Son of the Endless Night, page 9
Rich got out, overcome by a rush of nausea, and vomited raw undigested whiskey, aggravating his already-sore stomach muscles. Then, too weak to stand or even lean against a tree, he sank down into the snow.
Several seconds passed before he was aware of the rough chuckle of the Cadillac's idling engine.
When he lifted his head he saw the car less than a hundred yards away down the left-hand fork of the road. Her foot was on the brake; the taillights glowed. It was about all he could see of the Cadillac, taillights and parking lights. The car was approximately in the middle of the road. He wondered if she'd been waiting there for him, waiting for the expected accident.
Rich got to his feet and started toward the Cadillac, walking unsteadily, breath coming hard. He couldn't manage a straight line but he didn't lose his balance; he kept going doggedly.
Tires squealed on the road as the brakes were slow to release. Then the Cadillac lurched and drove forward.
"Wait!" Rich yelled, breaking into a jog.
She didn't wait. Perhaps she'd only wanted to know that he wasn't seriously hurt. The Cadillac went around a bend, she was still driving with parking lights only. The taillights flashed briefly through a stand of trees and then disappeared. Rich came to a limping halt, swearing tiredly.
As far as he could tell when he returned to it, the Porsche wasn't badly damaged. But both rear tires were hubcap-deep in snow and he couldn't drive it away. Wishing endlessly for cigarettes, he sat behind the wheel for nearly forty minutes, the erratic heater putting out just enough warmth to keep him from freezing, until a couple of high school boys in a hardtop Jeep Renegade came along and gave him a lift into Talbot.
"Do either of you know where Inez Cordway lives?"
Rich repeated the name; the boys looked at each other and shook their heads. He described her.
"Nobody I know," the Jeep driver said. "How about you, Ted?"
"No, I don't recall I've ever seen her."
Rich also described the fifties Cadillac, wishing he could remember the license number.
"Sounds like old Bob Thurlow would like to get his hands on that one," Ted commented.
"He must have a couple dozen old wrecks he's restoring."
"But you haven't seen Inez Cordway's car on the roads around here?" Rich asked the driver.
"No, and I'd remember a Cadillac that old. Nobody lives near us has got one, that's for sure."
17
Rich spent sixteen dollars of his thinning cash reserve to take a taxi to the Davos Chalet at Hermitage Mountain. He stopped at the desk for the room number of the honeymoon suite and carried his bags and Karyn's upstairs, not bothering to call first. It was twenty after one in the morning. He was so exhausted he almost fell asleep standing up in the elevator.
He was halfway down the brightly lighted hall before he noticed a couple necking in a doorway, and almost on top of them when he realized the girl was Karyn. Her back was to him. Trux Landall held her tightly, one hand between her shoulder blades and the other, roving slowly and possessively, on her ass.
"Oh, shit," Rich said.
They looked at him. Karyn's lips were still parted, plump and contact-reddened, her eyes steamily wistful from the long-held kiss. She backed inside the suite and Trux took a step out into the hall. He was dressed nearly head to foot in shimmering dark sealskin. One hand pulled the coat together as if to conceal what must have felt to him like a monster hard-on.
Rich dropped one bag and heaved the other, Karyn's tan SportSac, at Trux's head. The tall boy ducked without effort, and frowned.
"Take it easy, guy."
"Get the fuck out of here!" Rich shouted.
"I was just going."
Rich tried to kick him in his bulging groin. Trux backed away pacifically, but raised his hands just in case. Rich picked up another bag, his green duffel, and swung it by the leather strap.
"Rich, stop it!" Karyn pleaded.
He glared at her, dumped the bag, which was awkward to use offensively, and swarmed in on Trux, both fists going, kicking and slugging, street technique that had won many fights against bigger boys. But he was sluggish and a little awkward, and Trux parried without suffering any damage. He glanced helplessly at Karyn while keeping Rich at arm's length.
"I don't want any part of this, Karyn."
"Rich!"
She caught at an arm; he muscled her aside. Trux had time to take aim and nail him below the breastbone with a short right hand.
Rich sat down hard, mouth ajar; he rolled over whimpering for air.
"Sorry, Karyn," Trux said.
"Oh, God, he can be impossible when he gets like this!"
Rich was hazily aware of another door open down the hall, indistinct faces. More witnesses to his downfall. He got to his knees, discovered pride alone wasn't enough to get him back in the fight and stayed there massaging the spot where he'd been jabbed, knowing that he would topple if he tried to stand. Air leaked into his lungs. He gasped, looked up and around at Karyn's face. She was crying.
"Get you— for this," he said, to nobody in particular.
Trux said, in parting, "I was only saying good-night."
"Didn't she give you enough— inside?"
Karyn, her face reddening, gathered up the luggage Rich had thrown around the hall and carried it into the suite. She banged the door but opened it again in a fury, not caring who was listening.
"God damn you, where've you been all night? Couldn't you call? I was worried sick!"
"Accident," Rich said. With a wall behind him he stood. But he couldn't straighten all the way, or get his feet to work. Trux was blithely on his way to the elevators, turning with a good-bye wave to Karyn. She didn't notice.
"Oh, no! Where? What happened?"
"Car— ran off the road."
Karyn put an arm around him. "Wrecked? Oh, well. Come on."
Petulant, he resisted. "Was tricky Trux fucking you?"
"Rich, grow up! Trux was just keeping me company. You weren't here when I got back, I didn't want to be by myself. Now will you please get inside?"
He needed her help at this point, and grudgingly permitted it. His feet shuffled. She sat him down on the bed, which was mussed but not unmade. Rich lay back, wincing. Another time, he could have taken Trux. Flash but no guts, he knew the type. Got him with a sucker punch.
"Kill the bastard," he said vaguely.
Karyn made a tough tight face to control her tears. "Just shut up! It was a good-night kiss. Okay, a little heavy. I used to go with him, for God's sake! Trux is a friend."
Rich rolled his eyes in disbelief. "So just tell me the truth. Did you fuck him tonight?"
"No, I did not."
After a while Rich said generously, "Okay, I believe you."
"I don't give a shit if you believe me or not! I'm sick of the way you're acting. I don't know what's got into you.
All I want is to be happy. I want to feel good about us, Rich. Can't you make it a little easier?"
He was silent, eyes half closed, face with that taut, famished look of extreme fatigue.
Karyn got up sniffling, went to the bathroom for a tissue, came back and sat down closer to him. His hand moved tentatively, touched her cold fingers. Karyn gave him no encouragement, but she didn't move her hand away.
"Sorry."
"Is the Porsche hopeless?"
"I don't think so."
"About Trux. I guess— if you hadn't come along— maybe we would have come back in here. I don't know for sure. But no matter what we did, it wouldn't have meant— "
"Sure, sure. I don't want to talk about it anymore. Or him. I need to sleep, Karyn. Honest to God, I'm really tired."
After a few moments Karyn curled up beside him, touched his face softly. Rich kissed the palm of her hand.
"You left the lights on," he complained.
"Oh— I don't want to go to sleep in the dark."
"Why not?"
"There are things— that just can't be there with the lights on," Karyn said, trembling a little as she snuggled closer, her eyes wide, her face bleak.
18
Karyn did her best to get him out of bed at sunrise, but Rich protested bitterly that he was too tired and said that he hurt all over. Finally she gave him a conciliatory kiss, covered him up again and went down to the slopes by herself.
About nine o'clock, with the sun cutting like a laser across his face, Rich gave up trying to sleep any longer and crept into the bathroom, which was equipped with an oversized shower with numerous jet-spray nozzles, a Jacuzzi, heat lamps, and a sauna. He sweated for twenty minutes in the sauna, took a needle shower that was so cold it made his back teeth ache. With his blood flowing briskly he felt physical improvement, but the heavy depression that had settled in the moment he was up remained with him. He had dreamed, off and on, of the blackened room, the missing Polly, the gold-lined teeth of Inez Cordway, her pearly scar and presumptuous warning to him.
They were hiding the girl, brutally beating her, and they thought they could get away with it! Rich wasn't intimidated. But he had no clear idea of what to do next, only the intuition that he must move quickly, for Polly's sake.
Coffee on the sun-warmed cafeteria terrace lifted his mood a notch. He was ready for a big breakfast, which he packed away while keeping an eye on the runouts at the base of the mountain for Karyn. Saw her, a couple of times, near the chair lifts. Trux wasn't with her, or he might have been compelled to go out there and finish what he'd bungled the night before.
Rich poured more coffee and saw Benny Childs making his way toward the table, hobbling with the aid of a cane.
"What happened?"
"Strained my knee yesterday. No more skiing. I heard you and Karyn were staying up here now. Wish I could afford it."
Benny eased down into a chair, keeping his left leg, which was bulky with wrappings beneath his trousers, straight. He reached for a honey nut muffin on a plate, and was short. Rich handed him the plate.
"Yeah. The honeymoon suite. Coffee?"
"Thanks. The honeymoon suite? Are congratulations in order?"
"Premature. The suite was all that was available, and I can't afford it either. But Karyn couldn't move out of the inn fast enough."
"Oh, really?" He saw that Rich wasn't going to explain why. Benny held his coffee mug in two hands, smiling over the rim. "How is everything with you two?"
"What have you heard?"
"There was a tiff. No blows were exchanged."
"We made up."
"Good. Are you about to hit the slopes?"
"No. I left my car in a snowdrift last night. I need to start thinking about hauling it out."
"Tow truck required?"
"I don't think so. It's right by the side of the road."
"I'll loan you my Saab. There's about ten feet of heavy-duty tow cable in the trunk."
"That ought to do! Thanks, Benny."
"I'll just ride along with you. Nothing else to do this morning but read a dull book on the Gnostics."
On the way to Talbot, Benny told a couple of scatalogical jokes in an attempt to get Rich to lighten up; he was dour behind the wheel, head jutted forward, jaw clenched. Rich laughed perfunctorily, as if he'd missed the punch lines.
After a couple of silent miles Benny sighed and said, "I miss your company."
"What's that?"
"The brilliant dialectics, the cynical wit. Nothing offending you lately? The stewheads in Washington? The terrible state of the economy?
"Sorry, Benny."
Benny watched a hobbling dog by the side of the road, its left leg twisted backwards from the knee down. The sight depressed him. "You're sure everything's okay with you and Karyn?"
"Yeah. I wasn't thinking about her."
"So what's on your mind?"
"Benny, what kind of people believe in the devil?"
"Ahhh," Benny said, warming to a discourse, his mood improving. "Your kind of people, to begin with. The last I heard the devil hadn't gone the way of Mass in Latin, St. Catherine's feast day or fish on Fridays. The devil is still a part of the articles of faith, the essential dogma."
"Yes, but does he exist?"
"My personal view, or the rationalist policy line at Yale?"
"What do you believe?"
"If you ask me do I think there is a power opposite and equal to God, no, I don't. God is the only uncreated being, who always was and always shall be. God created the angels, and to the angels He gave free will. Some of them abused this freedom; by so doing they became His enemies and, indirectly, enemies of thee and me. So there are devils, small d, probably a slew of them; and their leader is called Satan. But he is the opposite of the Archangel Michael, not of God."
"But there's never been any proof that devils, or Satan, exist."
Benny tenderly rubbed his swollen knee, which he couldn't properly straighten in the cramped front seat. "Proving a negative is no cinch. St. Paul thought Satan was God of this world, and the New Testament is filled with the appearances of demons. Jesus exorcised them, probably with the showmanship of one of our modern evangelists. Satan, next to Christ, is the best-known figure in Christian lore. I'd say that belief in demons is consistent with the rationality of Scripture, Christian tradition, and the common belief of mankind throughout history. Also, and this may be of great importance, such belief is not in conflict with anything which science has demonstrated to be true."
"Assuming demons exist, what are they like? How could any of them possess a human being? Have you ever witnessed an exorcism?"
"I've seen an attempt, by a southern fundamentalist preacher I thought was more crazed than the poor lout he was trying to exorcise. Traditionally demons are represented as hideous inversions of the animal world— grotesque symbols which the mind of man can grasp. But we are, after all, talking about fallen angels. Creatures who exist on a higher plane of the natural order. Logically they have no form. They are a rarefied state of intellectual energy, or vibrations. If they want human form, and they must, they have to seize it."
"Why do they want human form?" Rich asked.
"Because they're afflicted with a kind of spiritual cannibalism, to borrow a fine phrase from C. S. Lewis. They prey on each other, and on easier targets: us poor humanoids. They have an imperishable hunger for human souls. No other motive than hunger. It's a pure, or impure desire if you will, to ravish and dominate, to be strongest. Of course that's a paradox. They can only despise God, never equal Him. They are merely shadows made by His immortal light."
Rich located his car without difficulty and, using Benny's sturdy Saab as a tow truck, pulled the Porsche out of the snowbank. It looked lopsided from the snow and ice clinging like barnacles to the right side. He used a rubber mallet to knock off the clumps of snow and clean out the obstructed fender wells; where the snow was harder than frozen, it resisted his hammering as if petrified. When he had cleaned it up he saw that the Porsche had some new dents, but the frame looked all right. He'd been luckier than he had a right to be, chasing around unfamiliar roads at high speeds at night.
Having worked up a good sweat and a jogger's heartbeat, Rich dumped the vinyl-covered tow cable back into the trunk of the Saab. Benny got in behind the wheel.
"Can you drive okay?" Rich asked him.
"I only have to use my right foot. No problem."
"Thanks for the help, Benny."
"Why don't we all get together tonight? Elise and I will drive up to the Chalet. Nine, nine thirty?"
"Fine."
Benny said, but not as if it were an afterthought, "Why the interest in devils, Rich?"
Rich hesitated, tempted to spill everything about Polly, her father, and the mysterious Inez Cordway. But he realized there would be too many gaps in whatever explanation he might make now; Benny inevitably would have questions that couldn't be answered. Benny waited, with the sly smile of one expecting an entertaining answer, but Rich only shrugged.
"Something I was reading. A paperback on demonology I picked up. I think it's all bullshit. I was just interested in hearing the theological point of view."
"Demons have been demythologized by most of our prestigious scholars. Entire books on Christianity have been written, by Hans Küng and others, that don't even refer to Satan. On the other hand, the worse things get, the more we hear about him. The charismatic movement is stronger than ever. We all want to blame something or someone for the pain and suffering in life, and our God is not Yahweh. So we give credence to evil personified: the Jews invented the devil to justify a spiritual crisis, their failure to achieve the nationalism they felt was theirs by divine right. That can be a tricky problem. If there are demons, which I believe, and we develop, let's say, an obsessive and unhealthy interest in them, they have a way of responding to our expectations and our needs." Benny started the car and put it into gear. "Elise will be wondering what happened to me. What are you doing the rest of the day?"
"I'm not sure. I may be attending an exorcism."
Benny laughed. "Matinee or evening? Tell me all about it tonight."
19
In Talbot Rich did the obvious first, consulting the area telephone directory, but there was no listing for Inez Cordway, or anyone named Cordway. She was not on the computer at the Green Mountain Power office. Nor was she a registered voter.
He bought a road map of the county at the college bookstore and spent half an hour in a coffee shop smoking and studying the roads in the vicinity of the T-cross where he'd come a cropper while in pursuit of the woman. There was no guarantee that she actually lived in the immediate neighborhood; she might purposely have been leading him nowhere. The boys who had come along in the Jeep obviously didn't know Inez Cordway— at least he hadn't detected any Yankee reluctance to furnish information about locals to a stranger. He'd never gotten a close look at the license number of the Cadillac, so there was no way to tap the files at the state motor vehicle bureau. He had to start somewhere, no matter how much time it took.
