The Croning Page 6

  Don briefly contemplated the panic that should’ve coursed through him. He felt most excellent, adrift on a pink cloud. These men were his facilitators, solicitous to his every need, and his need was to continue floating, to feel the balmy breeze rushing over his damp skin. Michelle’s face bobbed to the surface of his muddled consciousness and gazed at him with loving disapproval, then burst into vapor and troubled him no more as the men hoisted him upon their shoulders and carried him like a football hero. Ramirez walked ahead with a torch he’d fashioned from a stick and some rags and by that queer and reddish light, devils, or the shadows of devils hooked to the shoes of the men and capered across the stony earth.

  The walk lasted an eon and the stars hardened and fossilized in the heavens and Don’s blood slowed to stagnancy in his veins. Ramirez began to sing as the path rose and the group came to the mouth of the cave, and though completely incapacitated physically and mentally, Don was amazed by the size of it. The thing yawned like the spiked maw of the Ouroboros and what Ramirez sang was a song of death, of sacrifice.

  They proceeded into the cave and along a tunnel. The floor was sandy and occasionally the men’s shoes crunched upon bits of shattered bottles of revelries past. And they continued through a snaky side passage, emerging at length into a great cavern. Stalactites spiked the ceiling and the torchlight reflected from deposits of quartz and mica. Even to Don’s reduced sensibilities, the chamber felt ancient and malign, a cyst in the granite sinew of the mountain, and fear kindled in his belly. A feeble thing, his fear, pacified and quieted by whatever drug his companions had slipped him at the cantina.

  “Aw, shit,” Don said to no one in particular as he was laid across a slab of worked stone with a smooth concavity marking its axis and a series of deep grooves carved into its foot. The surface of the slab had been fashioned and planed so that it canted toward the edge of a pit. The pit spanned perhaps six feet. An odor of decay wafted from its depths.

  The men lighted more torches that were fixed to sconces of blackened iron in the walls. Each man stripped to the waist then donned the headdress and mask of a demon or beast, or demonic beast, and joined his fellows in the wicked chant, this accompanied by the blowing of reeds and clashing of cymbals and piercing ululations that echoed most alarmingly from rock that had seen slaughter and sadism aplenty in its epochs as sentinel and receiver of blood.

  Clubbo and Günter were monkey demons, Kinder a bird of prey with a yellow beak, while Ramirez had donned the trappings of a monstrous bat. Kinder took the ugly stone dagger from his belt and held it loosely, like an ice pick. Ramirez brought forth a similarly brutal stone tomahawk and danced recklessly near the pit, waving a blazing torch in his other hand.

  Their dreadful song reached a crescendo. Don considered struggling, tried to flex his hand, tried to swing upright, and found that his extremities were beyond leaden and now short-circuited, nerveless lumps. He closed his eyes and waited. There came then a strange and hypnogogic interlude which might’ve lasted seconds or minutes and the song resumed altered; shriller and discordant. When he managed to summon the strength to look, he beheld the wondrous sight of Ramirez levitating as if a puppet jerked off his feet by a string, then flying in reverse into the greater darkness of the cavern. He shrieked piteously and flailed with the torch and vanished.

  Don couldn’t see any of the other men as their screams and wails diminished in opposite directions. However, the acoustics were treacherous. He fell unconscious for a much longer duration. When he awoke, the torches had died, leaving him in blackness. His body and mind were free of the drugged lassitude. He shook violently with chill and pent animal terror and those were bad moments.

  Someone whispered, “Let the dark blind you on the inside, Don. There are frightful things.”

  A family bound for market found him on the road near a small southern village two days later; cut, bruised, suffering from exposure and a gash on his temple likely received in a fall. He’d lost twenty pounds and skated very near death. Michelle came with the police and officials from the U.S. Consulate. Even Dr. Plimpton frantically hopped a flight and ensconced himself in the hallway, berating himself for some mysterious reason Don was too addled to comprehend.

  She sobbed and lay with him on his hospital bed and kissed him a thousand times, explaining that he’d completely misunderstood her last words the morning they’d parted—she and Professor Trent hadn’t visited any ruins. There were no ruins. Instead, they’d attended an informal lecture at the home of a German scientist at his villa in the hills. No phones, as the fellow was a notorious recluse. The bus had blown a gasket, so the guests were detained for nearly a day waiting for fresh transportation. An awful misunderstanding.

  Naturally, the local authorities questioned him regarding who he’d spoken with and where these people had taken him. Already, the details of names, faces, and events slipped through his memory as eels through a skein.

  Don remembered nothing of his escape from the cave. Within a few years, his only solid recollection of that Mexico vacation was the superheated romance with Michelle in their hotel and vague impressions of snooty bureaucrats, menacing street thugs, and a parade or party where everyone had worn horrible masks. The rest was simply smoke. For her part, Michelle never spoke of it again.

  CHAPTER TWO POINT FIVE

  Wenatchee, 1980

  The entomologist died with his bloody lips pressed to Agent Crane’s ear; a slimy crimson seal that burst when the scientist’s head lolled, fell to the pillow. Agent Crane stepped away from the bed and its glassy-eyed passenger. The dead black bulk of a revolver lay near the corpse’s left temple. The revolver was still warm, still reeked of oil and scorched metal. So much for their Person of Interest. He pulled a handkerchief from his pocket and dabbed his gory earlobe.

  The wind came against the farmhouse. A draft licked Agent Crane’s ankles. Limp drapes breathed like balaclavas to the small-mouthed windows. The windows were dark and cold. Everything rattled, sighed, subsided.

  “Melodrama, day-o.” Agent Barton leaned against the door jam. A tall man, he appeared huge because the doors and halls were tacked up in the ’20s when economy of design was king. “What did he say?”

  Agent Crane wiped his hands.

  An antique clock ticked and clicked on an antique dresser; a bulb sizzled in a brass lamp. There were many framed pictures; generations of them, arranged by columns. The pictures existed under foggy glass, subjects made spectral by shadows, their abrupt irrelevance to any living being. Below Agent Crane’s shiny wingtips, the tattered throw rug and warped floorboards, came dim, aquatic creaks and bumps of other agents on the ground level. Men in crisp suits knocking about with flashlights and cameras.

  “Hey, Tommy,” Agent Barton said.

  “Yeah.”

  “Did he say something?”

  “Yeah.” Mr. Crane finished wiping his hands. He didn’t know what to do with the cloth, so he held it between thumb and forefinger. Something crashed downstairs; nervous laughter followed. A dog barked in the yard. “Goddamn it. Fifteen minutes sooner…”

  “Fifteen minutes sooner he might’ve plugged you or me instead if himself. Want coffee?” Agent Barton didn’t wait for an answer; he went to the dresser and used the phone to brief Section. Section had alerted the local authorities, would coordinate the necessary details. After disconnecting with Section, he took a deep breath, visibly composed himself for the call to their field supervisor. It was a short conversation—Yes, ma’am. No, ma’am. We’ll be back tomorrow in the PM, ma’am. He shuddered, smiled in a perfunctory manner. “We’re done here. Want coffee? Let’s get some coffee.”

  Agent Crane nodded. The techs would scour the room, ants on jelly. Maybe there was a note, a recording. Probably nothing. He followed his partner into the narrow hall, down the narrow stairs. They acknowledged the other men, the ones with the gloves and the specimen bags.

  Once they were in the car and crunching slowly along the gravel lane, Agent Crane began
to relax. He lighted a cigarette. Bony poplars clawed at the stars. Clouds blacked a steadily widening swath of the lower heavens. Three cruisers from the Chelan County sheriff’s office met them head on, ghosted by, trailing rooster tails of dust. Red and blue flashes wobbled through the empty fields and imprinted behind Agent Crane’s eyelids.

  “What’s with you?” Agent Barton said.

  “I couldn’t make it out.”

  “Couldn’t make out what? What Plimpton said?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Looked like he had something on his mind.”

  “Did it.”

  “Yep. Hey, there’s that truck stop on 97. Burger and coffee.”

  “OK.” Agent Crane cracked the window. Agent Barton hated it when he smoked in the car. Agent Crane lighted another. His head felt thick, felt like a lead ball. The adrenaline was seeping from his system, leaving him shaky and depressed.

  They made the highway. Every mile reduced Agent Crane’s sensation of dread, until what remained curled in the pit of his stomach. It hit him this way sometimes, but not often, not in years. This wasn’t the suicide, either. Plimpton was a photo, a paragraph in a dossier. A pathology report now. Meat.

  No, it was something else, some indefinable thing. The other team members had felt it too, judging by their flared nostrils and unhappy smiles. Agent Barton felt it as well; he drove too fast. Barton always drove fast when he was in a mood. Maybe the team would uncover something. Maybe there was a secret stash of chemicals, guns, incriminating documents. Bomb-making supplies. Agent Crane didn’t want to go back and hang around. He preferred to wait for the report.

  He said, “You think she knew?”

  “She called it. She must’ve known something.”

  “Could be a coincidence…”

  “And what do you say about coincidence?”

  “Fuck coincidence.”

  “Right. So she knew, she was right about that much. But, if they don’t find anything hot, it’s going to look like another circle jerk.”

  Barton said, “You think they’re going to post us in Alaska, huh? Don’t worry—Alaska’s pretty nice in the fall, long as you pack some electric underwear.”

  They drove in silence for a while. Then, Crane said, “I wish I could’ve made out what Plimpton was trying to say.”

  “Uh-huh.” Barton’s eyes were slits in the dashboard glow.

  “He…slurred. Mumbled. You know.”

  “Probably didn’t see you, Tommy.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah. Brains all over the wall. He didn’t see you.”

  “He was pretty gone.”

  “That’s what I told Section.”

  “Good.”

  “Good. Not our problem.”

  “We got enough of our own.”

  “Yep.”

  The men chuckled, and now it shrank to a sliver, the wedge of ice in Agent Crane’s gut. Later, after a greasy dinner at the Rattlesnake Prairie truck stop, they checked into a no-tell motel, left a 5am wakeup call with the night clerk.

  Crane donned his bifocals and burned the midnight oil, scanning a briefcase load of papers, including geological surveys on the substrata of the Wenatchee Valley region and a corresponding environmental report documenting its effects on the local ecosystems. Then there was the twenty-page compilation of homicide, assault and missing persons statistics. This latter read like a segment from the Detroit Free Press crime insert rather than the description of an agrarian county populated by vineyards, orchards and farms. Eventually he switched off the bedside lamp, sat against the wall, sipping bottled water. Barton snored across the room. Agent Crane couldn’t banish Plimpton’s red mouth from his mind. Freezing rain pelted the roof. The wind returned, hungry. The tall lamp in the parking lot emitted a cheerless glow and at some point it wavered and snuffed like a blown candle.

  Black.

  Right before Agent Crane went down for the count, the night terrors of childhood rushed over his skin and paralyzed him on the cheap bed in the unlit room. A door squeaked softly as it swung to and fro, to and fro, and stopped. The blinds shivered as if beneath the faintest stir of breath. He was a child in dread of the yawning closet door, a grown man pinioned to a bed, a federal agent leaning over a dying man in a rundown farmhouse, and his personal gloaming approached from all points at once.

  Plimpton whispered, They Who Wait love you, Tommy.

  Agent Crane inhaled to scream, but the blood was already pouring in.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The Rabbits Running in the Ditch

  (Now)

  1.

  Autumn was around the corner after a scorching summer. Of late, the days remained dry and hot, while evenings saw starry skies and crisp temperatures. Don wandered to the yard some evenings and watched the star fields blink and burn, his heart filled with a profound sense of disquiet he couldn’t identify. The cold impassive stars didn’t bother him so much as the gaps between them did. He was old, though. Old and unsteady in mind and body. A real flakey dude, according to his loving wife.

  The feeling was always gone by morning.

  During the last official week of summer, he dusted off his beloved 1968 Firebird and squired Michelle into town for dinner and drinks as an early sixtieth anniversary present. Don had booked reservations at the Inn of Old Wales, a traditional Welsh pub and restaurant incongruously transplanted inside a refurbished Spanish mission, half an hour from their farmhouse in the Waddell Valley. Due to a combination of circumstances and her reticence to appear anywhere within a thousand yards of a tavern, this was but the second occasion he’d managed to drag her to the inn.

  It was a now or never sort of proposition. The twins would arrive for an impromptu vacation in the morning: Kurt and his new wife, the princess from Hong Kong; and Holly with a girlfriend who accompanied her every summer on various adventures. Next week, Don was scheduled to moderate lectures regarding the Cryptozoic Geomorphology exhibit at the Redfield Memorial Museum of Natural History, and Michelle would leave for an anthropology summit in Turkey, the latest destination of her annual Eastern pilgrimage. Don wished like hell he could hop a ride with his wife; he dreaded moderating the panel of stuffed-shirt academic rivals, all of them with axes to grind and scores to settle, before an audience of, well, dozens, if one included the light and sound technicians, the caterers and custodians.

  Don and Michelle took the impending hubbub in stride. Theirs were lives characterized by steady, placid routine, punctuated with moments of absolute anarchy. Hers was a formidable presence in the field of comparative anthropology, due in part to no mean skill at writing brilliantly flamboyant papers and securing lucrative grants through savvy and guile. Her detractors grumbled that she wasn’t likely to depart the game unless it was feet first, and probably in the belly of an anaconda, or after succumbing to some dreadful foreign scourge such as malaria. Meanwhile, Don served the Evergreen State University as a geophysics professor emeritus.

  The drive went pleasantly enough, even if the Firebird’s brakes were tight and Don tended to overcorrect on the bends—he’d packed the beast away a decade past and only fired it up for a yearly shakedown cruise. His wife preferred he stuck to the Volvo or their minivan, especially now that he wore thick glasses and his reflexes were nearly shot to pieces and he tended to forget things, although that part had gone on for several decades, at least. She claimed it was against her policy to ride around in a muscle car with a octogenarian at the wheel.

  We must hurry, my sweet, or the Grand Prix shall start without us, he’d said when he zoomed up to the front door. She frowned in dismay at his prescription sunglasses, driving gloves, and the checkered scarf wrapped around his neck—which he’d worn just to get her goat. Don eventually coaxed Michelle into the car by champing a rose in his teeth and patting the passenger seat. Oh, you old fool, she said, tittering into her hand.

  They crossed into Olympia under orange skies, and followed potholed avenues through historic neighborhoods, winding serp
entine along the ridges; then, racing between the majestic shadows of one-hundred-twenty-year-old maples. The road continued until the coastline curved and separated from the city proper.

  Michelle gasped happily when the inn hove into view atop a bald crest several switchbacks above their rapidly moving car. “Oh, my—I’d forgotten how lovely it is.” Her sunglasses reflected the fires of sunset. She wore a kerchief and bonnet like Vivian Leigh.

  He cast sneaking glances at her, admiring the exquisite beauty she’d matured into, feeling a pang of lust that he hadn’t shaken since their first date, the first time she’d lifted her dress and wrapped her powerful legs around his waist—and he belayed that line of thought immediately lest they fly off the road into a ditch due to his amorous distraction.

  At eighty-two and a half, Michelle conceded to a solitary vanity: her long, dark hair had bleached dead white and she preferred to disguise that fact in public. The scars, on the other hand, didn’t affect her self-confidence. Her face and torso bore marks from injuries suffered during a jeep wreck. Years and years ago, while on an expedition into the heart of Siberia, her driver flipped their vehicle on a muddy road in the foothills two hundred miles from the nearest town. She’d nearly died on the forty-hour trip to the hospital and no amount of surgery ever disguised the disfigurement—a jagged, white valley that slashed from her left temple, across her breast and arced to its terminus at her hip bone. Don was consulting a mining firm in the wilds of the Olympic Peninsula and didn’t receive news of the accident and Michelle’s brush with death for nearly a week. Yet another hazy interlude of his past that he’d resigned himself to never fully recollecting. Perhaps it was better to forget.

  Don smiled at Michelle to disperse his sentimental melancholy and talked about their destination. He’d been meeting Argyle Arden, Robby Gold and Turk Standish and the rest of the boys here for fifteen years to drink and play at darts. In 1911, the mission had been transported, brick by brick, from San Francisco and reassembled at its current perch above the Olympia Harbor. It was soon converted to a Roman Catholic priory at the behest of local founding father and resident eccentric, Murray Blanchard III.