Phantom Nights (37 page)

"What the hell are you supposed to be?" Leland said, barely able to believe what he was looking at.

The boy's lips parted. He didn't seem particularly flustered. He put a hand to his throat, chin tilting up, and squeezed lightly.

"Hello, Leland. Don't you know me? It's Mally."

Leland flinched at this accurate but creepy impersonation of Mally Shaw's voice. He felt a sizzling charge the length of his backbone, exploding in the hindbrain and nearly lifting off the top of his skull. He had been in a war, but nothing that happened in the Pacific had ever scared him like this.

"Shut up! Don't you do that again, you little cocksucker!"

The boy's eyes still looked flawed, tranced, withdrawn; but he said in Mally's voice again, and with her slightly sad, cynical smile, "Bet you didn't bring that thousand dollars with you. Did you, Mist' Leland?"

For an instant he thought he saw her face too, looking at him the way she'd looked up from flat on her back on the bed in her house with him between her legs, that anguished, humiliated expression. Accepting what had to come, belittling him somehow even as he drilled her brains out.

Who the hell did she think she was?

"I brought you this!" Leland shouted, and shot the boy in a trigger-pulling frenzy five times up and down his body, missing once maybe but driving him back against the wall, where he slumped then sprawled in a downfall of splashy little mirrors, not making another sound.

F
rozen. Deafened. A sharp twinge in his breast, the fascination giving way to horror like that following a viper's bite. His shadow thrown to the rafters above the heap of the boy lying up against the wall. Gun sagging in his hand. His mind half-cocked. Trying to make sense of it all. But he doesn't feel badly about what he has done. Goddamned fairy kid! Then urgency gooses him out of his momentary shutdown. He hears the wail of the approaching train at Half Mile. Less than a minute until it reaches Cole's Crossing.
Move
.

Leland looks around at the duffel on the floor by the lantern. Time to fetch what he has come for. Then clear out.

T
hey heard the gunshots that came from inside the depot as they were getting out of Bobby's station wagon, which he had parked in front of Leland Howard's Pontiac on the north side of the track. Immediately after that they heard the old bell, long thought to be useless, tolling in the belfry of Little Grove Holiness Church.

Bobby looked at Ramses and drew his own piece, then ran to the track (the going would be too slow any other way) and scrambled toward the depot. The headlamp beam of the
Dixie Traveler
was full in his face, twin four-thousand horsepower diesel-electric engines and a dozen luxury coaches, diners, and Pullmans. He felt the train's enormous pulse through the soles of his boots, felt it streaming upward through his veins, his bones electric.

From his calculations as he ran he thought it could be a dead heat at the near end of the two hundred-foot-long platform. He could play it safe, jump aside now and wait for the Traveler to thunder by, but he didn't know what was going on there in the depot, and he was afraid for his brother.

L
eland Howard yanked everything out of the duffel, items of clothing and cheap magazines and a couple of notebooks that had mostly blank pages. He didn't find what he was looking for; but what that might have been was vague in his mind. Evidence of a criminal act on his part. He would recognize it when he—

The
Dixie Traveler
filled his conscious mind with a certain terror, seventy-plus miles an hour and bearing down on him. Its dynamic like a surge of water into a small cave, lifting Leland to his feet.

Behind the pebbled glass of the glowing ticket window he saw another human form, unmistakably female, a rippling, shadowy movement right to left.

So there were two of them!

He brought the Colt across his body and flung a last shot at the figure behind the window. She vanished with the cascade of thick, sharded glass.

In two strides Leland reached the door to the stationmaster's office and wrenched it open.

Mally Shaw was in there, five days dead and looking it. Only her eyes were alive in her disfigured face. Their expression was as lively as her pleased smile as she let slip the leashes of three Catahoula hounds. They were just as dead and unearthly as Mally herself, but all violence in trembling light and shadow.

He had a moment to regret that he couldn't think of their names to call them off.

B
obby Gambier did a headlong leap to the end of the platform and sprawled there as the
Dixie Traveler
's lead engine rocketed past him. He pulled in a lungful of diesel-saturated air and made another dash for the depot doorway.

He ran into Leland Howard, who was on his way out.

Leland was making an eerie sound, high-pitched, a kind of whistling scream. It was the worst thing Bobby had heard from a human throat. There was blood on Leland's face from emptied eye sockets. He had a maniac's strength. With one gory hand he flung Bobby nearly ten feet.

Still making that unbearable keening sound, Leland wheeled around directionless on the platform, tripped himself up and fell back against the depot wall. His right hand opened on an egglike something. Bobby moved cautiously toward him. By the flashes of lighted train windows flying past them, Bobby realized that what dangled from Leland's fingers like an unlucky charm was one of his own blue eyes.

So Leland sat there screaming like a second Doppler effect of the diesel engine's air horn, his body twitching out of control. His hand clamped shut on the eye, Bobby making an effort not to vomit with the back of his neck cold from horror. He didn't think Leland would be going anywhere. He walked around him and into the depot waiting room.

By lantern light he saw a blue-steel .38 Colt on the floor and nearby Leland's other eye, bloody roots and all. Alex was lying much too still against the far wall.

The club car of the Traveler cleared the depot with a last wink of its crimson running lights, and the sudden quiet was unnerving. He didn't hear Leland Howard anymore; not much sound except for his own panicked breath as he kneeled beside his brother and tried to find a pulse. There was a steady flow of blood through the carotid artery; Alex's pulse was strong, and Bobby momentarily was light-headed from relief.

All Alex had on was a pair of shorts. He was lying on his red shirt, or so Bobby thought, but when he rolled the boy over saw it was a dress, fancy, tiny mirrors sewn to the bodice.

There were livid bruises on Alex's chest and stomach. When Bobby picked him up he was still holding fast to the dress. Four copper-jacketed .38 slugs fell out of the folds and rolled on the floor.

Now, what the hell?

"Is he shot?" Ramses asked as he came into the waiting room.

"Shot—yeah—I think—these bruises—but none of the slugs penetrated—I don't know what happened here! Alex is alive, that's all I care about. You better have a look at Leland Howard, he was screaming and screaming, I can't stand—"

"Mr. Howard is dead, Bobby."

"What?"

"Shock trauma, I would guess. His face is badly clawed. From the condition of his fingernails, I'm sure he did it to himself."

"Jesus! Why?"

"I think only Mally could answer that," Ramses said. He lifted one of Alex's eyelids, then the other, looking at Alex's pupils. "But she's not here anymore."

"Never was."

"Oh yes," Ramses said. "Mally was here, all right. I saw her. Why don't I tell you about that while you're driving? This boy is going back to the hospital as quickly as we can get him there."

R
amses hadn't been able to keep up with Bobby, and he waited until the
Dixie Traveler
was across the trestle before he trudged over the rails in front of the depot. A short run had used up another day of life and passion. His body now an adversarial creature of predestined design flaws. Testing his mettle with every breath and step he took beneath hotbeds of stars. He had a bloodbath fever.

As he was bending to the lifeless body on the platform (one fly already on the lower lip of Leland's silently shouting mouth), Ramses, in spite of fever, felt a chill like an arrow of ice in the humid, tarry night, as if another train were slowing down on the track behind him. The air he breathed turning storm-heavy, hovering, a weight on his chest.

Yes, another train—stopping at this crossing, ready for boarding now. Or was it the foment of his fever prompting this perception of the uncanny?

A tug like a child's hand caused him to turn his head. Fascinated, too old and debilitated to have fear.

So there was Mally, that sweet, pensive face. She wore a red dress with a scoop neckline and stars in their places: folderol but stylish, a holiday dress for celestial sight-seeing.

He saw his daughter elevated in stately drift, like an icon on a pallet in a religious procession. Certainly not altogether real to his eyes, yet she couldn't be called spirit.

The train (but one couldn't name it exactly that, just as "Silver Ghost" in Alex Gambier's fifth-grade story was something more than mere horseflesh). Supernatural, to be sure. Mally was aboard already, maybe the only soul traveling from here this night. An overdue soul; when she turned her eyes on him for the last time, he felt pity overwhelmed by a surge of exaltation.

"A
red dress?" Bobby said. "With little mirrors on it? Like the one Alex had a grip on, bullets fell out of it when I lifted him off the floor of the depot?"

"I don't remember seeing it," Ramses said. He was in the back of the station wagon, holding Alex's head immobile while Bobby raced them to the hospital.

C
ecily Gambier found Bobby asleep in a porch swing when she came outside with Brendan to take advantage of what coolness would be available to them that day in Evening Shade. Seven in the morning and the neighbors waking up and Bobby slumped over with an empty beer bottle in one hand. She gently took the bottle away, and he reacted with a startled jump, then smiled sheepishly at his wife.

"Why didn't you come to bed last night?"

"Last night?" Bobby shrugged and looked around at a calm August morning on West Hatchie Road, the folded paper on the porch, bumblebees browsing through their roses. "I just drove home a little while ago." He yawned. "No point in going to sleep, it's bound to be a hell of a busy day. Brendan's on formula now?"

"I told you he was. We started last night. He had a tantrum. But Dr. Yost said it was already past time to wean him."

"Yeah. Did you ever notice that sometimes when you were breastfeeding him he'd get a hard-on?"

"Bobby! Don't be telling me things like
that
."

"Well, he seems to be guzzling the stuff now."

"That's good, because Mom needs a break before the next kid shows up. Want to finish giving Brendan his bottle?"

"Sure." Bobby sat back on the swing and took Brendan from her. Brendan opened his eyes and looked up at his daddy, that look of purity and complete trust only seen in the youngest eyes. "Your mom okay?" Bobby asked.

"No, she's in a snit. Sure was a lot of fun around here last night. Bobby, how's Alex?"

"He may have some bleeding into the brain. But he was semiconscious and responsive around five a.m. Ramses got a colleague who is supposed to be the best in the south, a neurosurgeon, to drive down here in the middle of the night."

"A Negro doctor?"

"No. But what difference would that make as long as he was good?"

Cecily gave him an appreciative look and said softly, "Why, Bobby."

Bobby looked at her, perplexed, then smiled. Brendan pushed the nipple of the nearly empty bottle out of his mouth and wriggled.

"I didn't understand half of what you were trying to tell me on the phone from the hospital," Cecily said, sitting on the top step of the porch. "What happened to Leland Howard?"

Bobby was a long time answering her. He stood Brendan up on the porch, holding him by one hand. Brendan looked at him. Bobby said, "You're gonna take your first steps any day now. I don't want to miss that. So why don't you just walk over there to your mom right now? You need changing anyway." And he let go of the boy's hand.

Rhoda was getting out of her husband's car at their front gate.

"Wait a minute!" she called. "Let me fetch the camera."

"It's on the refrigerator, Rhoda," Cecily said, and held out her hands to Brendan. He hadn't moved yet, but he looked steady on his feet. Knew very well that he was the center of attention and that big things were expected of him right now.

"Cecily, I have to write my investigative report this morning. I plan to keep it simple. But all any of us can do is speculate. So officially what happened was, Leland Howard was out for a drive by himself, suffered chest pains, pulled over at Cole's Crossing, and made his way to the depot there, maybe thinking he'd find a phone to call for help. Got into a panic trying to pull some boards away from the depot door so he could get inside. Injured himself doing it and brought on a fatal heart attack."