The Night Listener and Others (41 page)

And she did. She started with that shortened fourth verse, and I’m not gonna try and sound like her because there’s no way, but it was all high and airy, not as screechy as before, but just plain spooky…

I begged him to go and save his dear life,

But alas he would not flee.

With the moon in the sky they hung him on high,

And the guilt sat hard on me.

She paused for a second, and I thought, oh shit, that’s all. She screwed Pete
twice
tonight. But then she went on, and it was the money shot…

For I had slain that maiden fair

With my love’s knife cold and straight,

In hope he would run toward the rising sun

And escape the Lovin fate.

Damn me, yes. We were getting there, all right. Nobody’d ever heard
that
one before. She started on the chorus…
Mother come quickly, Father come quickly
.…
Then I heard a rustling, shuffling kind of sound that seemed to be outside with me, and when I turned my head I froze. Up toward the front of the cabin there were some people walking. I counted four shapes in the moonlight, one after another. They were moving slow, but like they knew where they were headed…

Brother and Sister, see
…

The two shorter ones had on long skirts, and the two tall ones were wearing pants, so I figured two men and two women, but when they went through the door and I saw them in the candlelight they could’ve been anything. What was left of their hair was long and straggly, and if the old woman on the floor was a little long in the tooth, then these four had already had the worms at them. And that’s not just a figure of speech.

The only man I ever did love

Is hanging in front of me.

Then the old woman says, “It’s time for the last verse,” and she puts on her dress, thank God, pulls it over her head as fast as a young woman might, and quick gets on her feet while the others surround Pete, who’s still naked.

The two in pants reach down and grab him, one by his legs and the other by his arms, and pick him up like a baby. They go outside with him, moving fast now, toward that pole in the forks of two trees that I thought was the frame for a swing. The one man drops the top half of Pete’s body and the other one hauls up on the legs so he’s got Pete’s feet up in the air, one on either side of the pole. Then one of the women sticks Pete through the back of both ankles—Jesus, did he squeal—with a long wooden stake sharpened on both ends, and before I can shut my jaw they got him hanging head-down from the pole, and I realize that it ain’t no swing. It’s a pole for slaughtering hogs.

I fumbled for the gun in my pants and started to pull it out, but it got caught, and before I could free it the old woman started to sing again. It was the last verse. Oh Jesus, was it ever, and now her voice sounded almost sweet. And this is what she sang…

We hanged him up by his pretty white feet

So his hair near touched the ground,

We bled him and skinned him and butchered the meat,

The sweetest to be found.

We ate of the flesh, we drank of the blood,

And the power came over us then,

As strong as the rush of a springtime flood,

And the Lovins became young again.

Then one of the men cut Pete’s throat.

I knew it was too late, my hand on the gun slumped. The blood just poured out of him, and one of the women caught it in a wooden bowl. He kept moving for a while, but he was dead. I couldn’t have saved him. I keep telling myself that, and I hope it’s the truth.

Then they did what she said they’d do in the song. And I could only crouch there in the shadows and watch, afraid to move, praying the moon wouldn’t light me up. Hell, I didn’t know what they were, I didn’t know if I even
could
shoot them, if it’d do any good. It wouldn’t do Pete any good, that was for sure.

After they got done with Pete—taking what they wanted from him—they went into the cabin, and they ate and drank like the song said, and I was still too scared to move, to make a sound. But after a while the sounds inside the cabin, like pigs eating from a trough, they stopped, and it got quiet, and it was darker too. I’d just started to move when I heard the old woman’s voice—at least I think it was hers. It sounded different, soft but…
stronger
. It was singing.

It was singing a final chorus, a chorus that maybe nobody outside this hollow had ever heard.

When it was finished, I looked into the cabin through the chinks. All the candles but one had burned out. The Lovins, all five of them, were lying on the floor, like hogs that had eaten their fill and fallen asleep.

I stood up and took a step away from the cabin, and my foot lit right on a dry branch that snapped loud as a breaking bone. I held still. I could feel sweat just oozing out of me. I waited for footsteps crossing the cabin floor to the door, but they didn’t come.

So I got a little braver and looked in through the window. None of them were moving at all. It was like they were dead drunk. And then I knew what I had to do.

I thought about it as I picked my way through the trees toward the RV. Whatever these things were, they were evil. I didn’t know if they’d magicked Pete or what, but my folks are from the hills, and my grandpas and grandmas and aunts and uncles told me things that people would say were crazy, but which they really believed in. They saw things happen with their own eyes that we’d say were impossible. And I saw something tonight that made no sense at all in the real world. At the very best, these…
people
were murderers. Pete was dead, and they’d killed him. And worse.

I’d seen the two-gallon can of gas in the back of the RV, so I took it and a pack of matches and went back to the cabin. It was still dark but for the moon, and I finally looked at my watch. 2:35. There was plenty night left—too much of it.

It took me some nerve to go inside, but I did. The Lovins weren’t moving. Hell, they didn’t even seem to be breathing now. The last candle was burnt out, but the moon gave me just enough light to work. I slopped the gas all up the dry wood walls and over the floor. I didn’t splash any on the Lovins, though, just in case they might wake up, but they didn’t. The tallest man, who I took to be the father, was lying in a patch of moonlight, and he wasn’t what he’d been before. His hair was full and long and dark, except for gray at the temples, and his skin was whole again.

That was enough. I didn’t want to look at the others.

I poured a trail of gas out through the front door and then touched a match to it. It ran inside quick as a snake and the whole shebang went up at once. That dry wood took to fire like kindling, and in less than a minute the cabin was blazing. Nothing moved inside. I don’t think even the burning woke them up.

The hollow was pretty well hid, so I doubted anybody’d see the flames, and there was enough of a clearing around the cabin that I didn’t think it’d set the woods on fire, though I didn’t give a damn if it did or not. I wasn’t thinking real clear.

But clear enough to haul down what was left of Pete. I found an old shovel in an outbuilding and buried him away from the cabin, back in the woods. It would’ve been quicker to toss him in the fire, but I didn’t want him with them. Not any more than he was.

I said some words over him, climbed in the RV, and drove through the dark back toward Nashville. I got lost a couple times on those dirt roads, but finally hit a blacktop and got my bearings. Back at Pete’s I put the RV in his driveway and pulled my car out of his garage without anybody seeing me, and drove home.

I had the song with me. I had it in my head. And by God, I was gonna do something with it. I couldn’t tell the truth about how I got it, so I figured I’d pull that journalistic thing and say I couldn’t reveal my sources. If people don’t believe me, the hell with them. One thing in my favor is that it makes something terrible out of a song everybody loves, and if I’d made it up on my own, I sure wouldn’t have done that.

I kept Pete’s DAT copy of Bertha Echols and played it again and heard something else different. That line about “You are a lovin’ daughter/My father said to me/But before you wed I’ll see him dead…” That wasn’t transcribed right either. Bertha Echols sings it “You are
the Lovin
daughter” and not “but”—”
So
before you wed I’ll see him dead,” like one thing follows the other, and for the Lovins it did.

Once I had
all
the lyrics in my head, I told my manager about it and he got to work. Boy, did he ever. I’m recording it next week, and Sony’s already offered to buy out my Rounder contract. I’m getting a full hour with Terry Gross on National Public Radio, twenty minutes with Larry King, I’m booked on
Prairie Home Companion
, but we’re actually gonna spring the song on
Sixty Minutes
. I get the final segment, and they’re flying to Nashville and broadcasting me
live
singing it for the first time. A straight ahead ballad with guitar, no banjos or bluegrass from now on. Oh no, I’m looking to get back into country, where the money is.

Hell, I can wear a cowboy hat as well as the next guy, and lose a few pounds around my middle too. Besides, the country crowd aren’t as tough on you as those tightass bluegrass folks if you wanta split from your wife and remarry— or hell, maybe just be a swinger again.

Since Linda left, my love life’s been drier than a West Texas August, but it looks like my luck might be changing. Met a real honey in the Station Inn a few nights ago. Incredible. A ten. Eyes to drown in, sweetest voice you ever did hear, and we been goin’ out every night since. Kinda surprised me she’d be rubbin’ up on a guy my age, but maybe she’s got one of those daddy complexes you hear about. I know she’s got her sights set on this old songbird, because she says she wants to take me home tonight to meet her kin. What the hell, maybe her mama can cook.

A certain chubby mandolin player made a crack about the “old hag” I was with—I knew that boy’s eyesight was bad from the diabetes and the booze, but not
that
much. He must be near blind as a bat. Or just jealous. Can’t blame him, I guess. It’s pretty damn amazing that a girl like her is sweet on a guy like me. Yep, my luck’s just runnin’ good for a change.

That’s about it, I guess. Tomorrow’s
Sixty Minutes
, and I get famous again. I have to confess, though, I guess my conscience is bothering me a little—not over what I did up there in the mountains, but about whether I should do it or not, you know, take a song that people have loved their whole lives and turn it into something else, something…ugly. But hey, you can’t buy this kind of publicity. If I hadn’t have gotten it, maybe somebody else might’ve. And the money’ll be nice—I got the copyright, and whoever covers it—and there’ll be plenty in years to come—will have to pay old Billy Lincoln.

Yeah, like I say, the luck’s runnin’ good as a spring stream.

But I never did play that last chorus, did I? The last one I heard the old lady sing. Well, okay then, here we go, just in case I get hit by a meteor or struck by lightning before tomorrow night…

Mother come quickly, Father come quickly,

Brother and Sister see.

Every man I ever did love

Has given more years to thee.

Sweet.

Appointed

“Christ, he looks older every year.”

“He
is
older every year. So are we.”

“Well, hell yeah, but you know what I mean. At least we try to stave it off. I don’t think he even cares anymore.
Look
at him.”

Sybil Meadows took a good look, and thought that what she saw was not only sad, it was what could be her own future, which was sadder still. It was shitty enough that here she was, in her early sixties, behind a table at HellCon 4, for Christ’s sake, about to peddle her photos for twenty bucks each. What was shittier was that Glenda Garrison was right next to her.

Glenda was friendly enough, but she could be a bitch on wheels. Her claim to fame had been a series of B-movies she’d made in her twenties and thirties, before her boobs had drooped to where she couldn’t do the nude scenes that had made her such wet-dream bait for teenage boys. She’d lucked out with a supporting role as the hero’s mom on one of Joss Whedon’s series that had run for less than a year, but all of it was enough to let her make a decent living doing the con circuit.

Unlike Sybil, who was happy to both sell and sign her eight-by-tens from her years in the British series,
Donna Darkness
, for twenty bucks each, Glenda was a gouger. She charged twenty for the photo and another twenty to sign it or whatever piece of memorabilia anybody dragged in. She sold issues of
Playboy
with her photo spread (and spread it was) for thirty dollars, and signed it right across her breasts on the first page, for an extra twenty, of course.

Wesley Cranford, who Sybil now observed as he slowly and methodically set out his various photos and DVDs, marketed similarly to Sybil, selling both photo and signature for a reasonable sum. Of course he, like Sybil, had never made a career out of displaying himself naked, the way Glenda had. On the contrary, the fame of her fellow Briton, such as it was and as far as Sybil knew, was based on only one film, but one that had made an impression on several generations of horror fans.

In 1963, he had played a character named Robert Blake in a low-budget version of H. P. Lovecraft’s “The Haunter of the Dark.” The film had done next to no business when it had opened, but over the years had become a cult favorite, and had overshadowed Cranford’s subsequent career, which had consisted primarily of poverty row leads, B-movie supporting roles, and TV one-off appearances. Sybil saw him at various cons on the blood ‘n gore circuit, and he had been at the three previous HellCons. Two years before, he had even hit on her, discreetly enough for her to pretend to not recognize his intentions, thus letting him down gently. Always a gentleman, he had never tried again.