Ghost Dance (30 page)

Now, lying on the rug outside Andie’s closet, he heard Emily’s words echo around him.
This, Pat, could have been your afterlife.
And for the first time, he admitted Emily might have been right. He didn’t believe in life. He didn’t believe in love, either. How could he? He’d never been taught to love, only to survive by retreating, by keeping life at arm’s length. Gallagher had watched life as if it were an ironic drama unfolding in a fishbowl.

When it counted, when he could have committed himself totally to Emily through their child, he’d pressured her into aborting it and killed the relationship. When it counted, when he could have made some response of love toward Andie on their last night together, he’d retreated inside one of his glass boxes.

‘I had a second chance and I blew it,’ he moaned in disbelief. And then he began to cry. For himself. For Andie. And, yes, for Emily.

‘I’m sorry,’ Gallagher whispered. ‘I’m so, so sorry.’

He lay there, helpless and hopeless, for the longest time, wanting the impenetrable black wall to come for him and end the misery.

Then he found himself doing something he’d never done before. He got up on his knees. His hands came together of their own accord to beg the invisible for some sign of hope, some sign of forgiveness. He prayed to something beyond himself that he could change and that Andie might be spared.

Hours later Gallagher stopped, exhausted, convinced that it had been a wasted effort. Seamus had been right all along. There was no God. There was no afterlife. We blip into a cruel existence. We blip out of a cruel existence.

Andie Nightingale would the senselessly at the hands of a madman and there was nothing he could do to stop it. Gallagher punched his hand against the door to the closet until it splintered; then he staggered to her bed in the late-afternoon heat and passed out on top of the quilt.

His sleep was a deep and dreamless suspension in an unwavering blackness. But around midnight, Gallagher stirred up from the abyss into that state between conscious and unconscious. A warm prism of light appeared in that hollow space between his eyes. It rotated, gaseous and ignited, soothing his head as the stroke of a woman might a troubled man. Gallagher was at once awestruck and mother-comforted by its beauty and heard pulsing, like the thump of a stick against a leather drumhead, a thump he recognized as the beat of his own heart. The light slowed and took shape, vague at first, then more certainly into a woman in a buffalo robe with a single eagle’s feather hanging from her hair.

‘Help me, Sarah,’ Gallagher begged.

‘All I wanted was to go home,’ she replied. ‘All anybody wants is to go home. You can take me there. You can find her there. Only you can set us free.’

Many Horses turned and stepped back into the whitest part of the light. It swallowed her the way a snowstorm might a lone traveler on an empty plain, and the light ebbed from brilliance toward the gentle radiance of sunset on a distant horizon.

T
HE WIND CLACKING TREE
limbs returned Andie to the edge of consciousness. Her throat burned from the choking. Her lips ached from the gag he’d forced into her mouth, then covered with duct tape. Her feet were swollen from the parachute cord and the tape that bound her ankles. Her wrist throbbed where he’d hit her with the tomahawk.

She heard crows caw in the distance and forced open her eyes. Her vision doubled, fuzzed, then cleared.

Andie lay on her side on a filthy mattress in a cramped, low-ceilinged loft. A shuttered window creaked in the stiff, humid breeze. An old horseshoe was nailed to the wall alongside a faded metal sign advertising Winchester rifle cartridges. At her feet, the top of a wooden ladder jutted over the edge of the loft and she had an ill-formed memory of being carried up it. Clouds of mosquitoes hovered and whined around her in the dusky light. There were blackflies, too; they clustered around her eyes and crawled up her nose and bit. She groaned, snuffed and rolled over onto her back, trying to get away from them.

The crown of the mossy-boarded roof was busted through in several places. Thunderclouds rolled overhead.

Andie struggled to sit up against a pole supporting the roof. She arched forward, trying to see over the edge of the loft into the room below. Sheets of indigo cloth had been hung on the windows. Candles burned in the middle of the floor. A narcotic smoke, fungal and acid, wafted in the shadows.

‘It’s summer and you’re back among the living, Persephone,’ a deep voice purred directly over her shoulder.

Andie screamed into the gag. He came crawling around into her line of sight and she screamed again.

His torso was naked, darkly tanned and shaved. There were rings pierced into his nipples. Smears of blood from insect bites dribbled over his sweating skin and rippling muscles. He wore baggy green camouflage pants and that cloth hood that covered his shoulders like an executioner’s cowl. Through the slits in the hood his eyes glistened like mussel shells in a crimson sea. His lips were blue-toned and cruel.

‘So alive,’ he said in a hoarse and indistinguishable voice. ‘But soon I will be reborn, too. I can join you, Angel. I have the squaw’s ceremonies now! The old man never lied to me. Father never lied to me. We’ll finish it now and walk the far bank together, sweet Persephone!’

His hand traveled to his groin. His lips curled into a smile of lust and delight. ‘Remember? You and I, Angel? Just like before? Only this time I’ll dance with ghosts, too. There is another way! I told you it was true.’

Andie shuddered and swallowed. She mustered up a gaze of sympathy and understanding and directed it at the creature. His eyes flared and held hers transfixed. He pressed his hand tightly against his crotch.

With a fragile motion of her chin, she made it known she wanted him to remove the gag. He hesitated, then slid over next to her and she saw the tomahawk up close. He danced it before her, a chipped obsidian blade that had been shoved down into the split leg bone of an animal, then anchored with sinew. A primitive hatchet. An Indian weapon.

‘No one will hear you if you scream,’ he said raspily. ‘Do you understand?’

Andie nodded and tried to appear grateful. His free hand struck like a snake, tearing the duct tape and the gag from her mouth in one vicious motion. He slid back several feet, then sat Japanese-style on the backs of his lower legs. Andie worked her aching jaw, then croaked, Water.’

He did not move for the longest time. ‘Please, Charun,’ she croaked. ‘Your Angel wants water.’

He cocked his head, studying her. Then he reached around to draw a drab green water bottle from the shadows. He slid toward her a second time, his hand snatching her hair and wrenching her head backward. The water poured into her throat. She gulped, sputtered and swallowed again.

When Andie had had her fill, he let the spout drift an inch below her lower lip. He moved the stream back and forth across her chin. The water poured down her neck, pooled and soaked the yellow blouse about her breasts. His eyes devoured her.

She took a deep breath, as if preparing to step off a high precipice, then shoved her chest out at him. ‘Do you like Angel’s breasts?’ Andie whispered.

The dead eyes flitted from her face to her chest and back. He put down the water bottle and his hand came up and cupped the weight of her left breast. His breath issued forth raspy and excited. His hips thrust forward, prodding against her arm. Her eyes spun in their sockets as if seeing fragmented, herky-jerky images of a long-ago night, but she did not scream.

‘Do you like Persephone’s breasts?’ she managed to whisper again.

He grunted with satisfaction, pinched her nipple, then ran his hand down across her stomach to press his open palm between her legs. She squirmed and cried out: ‘No!’

The monster’s other hand dropped the hatchet and immediately his fingers were like a knotted cord around her throat. ‘Why not?’ he seethed. ‘You used to say fucking was the closest we’d ever get to the power, Angel. Every time closer to the other side, you said. I was your boatman, you said. I was your rower!’

Andie did not struggle, but adopted that look of sympathy again.

‘You were my boatman, Charun,’ she whispered. ‘Tell me about our rope. Tell me how I got to the other side.’

Inside the hood, the eyes became unscrewed and glazed. His hand turned viselike at her windpipe. ‘You wanted it tight around our necks, tight while we fucked, Angel,’ he said.

‘Make me remember,’ Andie implored. ‘You left me there on the other bank, but I can’t remember. Make me remember.’

‘We smoked until our heads fired,’ he replied. ‘You said the drugs would take us farther, quicker. Then you made me cinch the rope tighter and tighter. You said orgasm was the first instant of life. You said if we could get to the edge of death at the first instant of life, it all might balance for a moment and we would see …’

‘Into eternity?’ Andie asked

‘Yes!’ he gasped.

‘But I passed over and left you behind, didn’t I?’

His hand fell away from her throat. ‘Yes,’ he gasped again.

‘You have the squaw’s ceremonies,’ she reminded him. ‘You can cross.’

‘We’ll smoke and perform them,’ he said huskily. ‘We’ll smoke and dance her Ghost Dance. The old man said we will see the other side! Father said so, too. Lawton said it was theirs. They took the secret from us.’

He leaped to his feet, his fists shaking against the sky. ‘Lawton gave me the power of death. Now I will take back the power over death!’

A
FTER MIDNIGHT STILL MORE
heat flooded north out of the mid-Atlantic, a stifling and creeping air mass that squatted over central Vermont. There was a halo of red around the setting moon. Far to the west Gallagher heard thunder. Three different turkeys shock-gobbled off the roost down by the Bluekill. An owl hooted in return. The interplay of the sky’s rumbling and the cries of the territorial birds opened up hollow, ominous places in his stomach that he did not know existed.

‘Omens,’ Gallagher murmured, and in that he understood. After so many years a willful voyeur gadding about the world to record the legends and mores of various cultures, he was at last being forced to live his own myth. Many Horses was his Goddess. The Lawton killings, Gallagher’s epic journey. He was haunted Perseus searching for his Andromeda, held captive by the forces of madness.

Gallagher gripped the pump-action shotgun he’d found in one of Andie’s closets and got in the truck he’d rented at the Lebanon airport. Ground fog wafted through the birches that lined the lower River Road. A squad of troopers manned a blockade set up at the covered bridge. One of them was the rawboned trooper who’d waded out to help him pull Potter from the Bluekill a lifetime ago. He told the trooper he couldn’t sleep. The trooper asked if the shotgun was loaded and Gallagher lied, and said no.

Except for several prowling state police cruisers, the streets of Lawton were almost deserted. Here and there, lone figures hustled through the predawn toward jobs as maids or breakfast chefs. One of them, a younger woman, watched Gallagher pass. When he slowed, her hand flew to her mouth and she sprinted in the other direction. Both clerks working the all-night shift at the Lawton minimart where he stopped for coffee had pistols shoved in their waistbands. It was as if a fiend had cast a spell of fear and distrust over the country town.

Over on Whelton Lane, yellow spotlights illuminated the façade and steeple of St Edward’s Catholic Church. Gallagher parked around the corner from the rectory, then slipped behind the church and scaled the garden wall. The scent of freshly turned earth permeated the air as he sneaked toward Monsignor McColl’s residence. The birdbath with the small horse statues lay on its side next to a gaping hole in the ground.

Gallagher’s heart came high in his throat as he knelt next to the hole. He flipped on the headlamp he ordinarily used when night casting for big brown trout. It had a red lens that did not disturb the feeding fish. The pit was more than five feet long by two feet wide by six feet deep. A grave.

There was a basement door under the porch. One tap on a cracked windowpane and Gallagher’s hand was through and on the knob. Cobwebs feathered and broke across his cheeks past the furnace toward eight standing file cabinets. Ten of the legal-sized drawers were dedicated to Father D’Angelo. All locked.

He thought about breaking in, but decided against it; he didn’t have the time to look for clues to Many Horses’ death. Sarah had obviously come in contact with D’Angelo shortly before she died and told him of Joshua Danby’s threat to kill her unless she taught the bogus spiritualist to commune with the dead. The Charun killings were related to Sarah’s murder a century ago. Gallagher was sure of it. But digging through drawers of material looking for the link could take days.

Andie didn’t have days. She had hours. Maybe less.

Besides, Gallagher had other, more quickly verifiable suspicions to confirm. He slipped upstairs into the hallway. His lamp shone on the damaged painting of Father D’Angelo. With a little effort he was able to lift the portrait down off the wall. The tear in the canvas at the priest’s left hip had been bothering him ever since he learned that Father D’Angelo must have known Sarah Many Horses. Perhaps the hole in the painting was neither an accident nor a random act of vandalism. Perhaps it had been done deliberately.

What do priests wear at their hips? Gallagher asked himself, as the backing peeled off the painting. He shone the lamp at the hole from the back side.

‘I knew it!’ he whispered. The canvas had not been sliced with a knife as Monsignor McColl had suggested, but was punctured with a narrow, blunt object, like a cane tip or a broom handle. Shards of canvas bent inward, away from the hole. He gently pushed the torn canvas back into place, then flipped the painting around again, leaned it up against the wall and bent down to get a better look. A set of rosary beads hung from a sash around the priest’s waist. At the end of the rosary was a tiny gold crucifix encrusted with a red jewel.