THE BUSINESSMAN A Tale of Terror Page 18

  “Oh, you are so disgusting,” said Judy. She got up from the table and began to buckle on her yellow rain slicker.

  “Hey, it was in the newspaper. I didn’t make it up.”

  “But if I know you,” said Maryann knowingly, “you’re sorry you weren’t there to see it happen.”

  “Judy didn’t eat any breakfast,” Jack reported in a neutral tone, so as not to seem to be tattling.

  “Oh, Judy, you shouldn’t neglect your breakfast,” said Mrs. Sheehy dully. She was standing propped against a kitchen counter watching the coffee trickle down through the Mr. Coffee.

  “I’m not hungry,” said Judy, “and I don’t want to have an argument about it.”

  “She thinks,” said Jack, “that anorexia is a status symbol. It said on that TV program she watches that only girls from very well-to-do families become anorexics. Right, Judy?”

  “Oh, why don’t you go fishing!”

  Maryann laughed, spluttering milk across the table.

  Mrs. Sheehy sighed. “Maryann, you better get your coat on. You’re going to miss the bus again, and I won’t be able to drive you. The Toyota’s getting fixed.”

  “Right, Mother.” She slammed her textbook closed, looked up at the spider plant hanging in a macramé web above the table, and declaimed:

  “Alone, alone, all, all alone,

  Alone on a wide, wide sea!

  And never a saint took pity on

  My soul in agony.

  “The many men, so beautiful!

  And they all dead did lie:

  And a thousand thousand slimy things

  Lived on; and so did I.”

  Jack smirked (it was poetry) but applauded out of respect for his sister’s histrionics and the scuzzy details. Judy stalked out of the room with an accusing glance at her sister, who ought to have known better than to offer Jack aid and assistance in his endless efforts to lower the tone of the Sheehy household. Mr. Coffee blinked a red light to show that he had performed his first task of the day, and Mrs. Sheehy poured herself a cup of coffee.

  Jack had ten minutes’ leeway between the time his sisters left to catch their school bus and when he had to set off for his. This morning, seeing that his mother was hung over and unavailable for small talk, Jack passed the time working on areas of rooftops and trees in the jigsaw puzzle of Berchtesgaden presently in progress in the family room in the basement.

  At precisely 8:12 Jack’s digital watch bleeped. For a moment divine grace offered him a detour around the fate awaiting him in the back yard, but Jack misinterpreted his impulse to finish the jigsaw puzzle with no more delay as a simple temptation to play hookey. But what would be the good of that? Dull as school could be, it was more fun than moping around the house and watching his mother watch TV. So, ignoring God’s little hint, Jack put on his plastic rain poncho and went out the back door and across the commons to the school bus stop on Pillsbury Road.

  He’d not gone many steps beyond the Sheehys’ own lot when he was brought up short by a sight that surely had not been seen in Willowville since it had ceased to be a swamp. High up in the top branches of the willow overlooking the concrete pond in which Jack had daydreamed of breeding lobsters there was a large blue heron. At least that’s what Jack assumed it was, for it was that general color and had long legs and a long pointy beak of the type he knew herons were supposed to have. While he watched, the heron spread its wings and glided on a long spiral down toward the pond, where, without ever landing, it made a jabbing motion with its beak, as though trying to spear a fish.

  A heron—here in Willowville! It went beyond being a mere matter of interest: it was a news event. Jack’s father kept an old 35 mm camera loaded with film on the principle, now proven, that you never knew when something amazing might happen. While the heron circled the tree and glided down over the pond for another grab at whatever it had its eye on, Jack dashed back into the house, taking care not to slam the door or otherwise alert his mother to his return. She’d already settled down in front of Good Morning, America to listen to celebrities discuss the problems of success. The camera was where it was supposed to be, in the lower right-hand drawer of the china cupboard in the dining room. Back on the commons, Jack slipped the camera out of its leather case, removed the lens cap, and framed the heron, now standing in the pool, in the viewfinder.

  The heron was too far off for a good picture. Jack snuck up to it little by little, always keeping it in the center of the hairline bull’s-eye, adjusting the focus the nearer he got. It was going to a super picture.

  And there, hopping out of the pond, was the heron’s destined prey, a green frog. The frog obligingly zigzagged through the tulips and across the lawn right toward the camera, and the heron wobbled along after him, hot in pursuit, jabbing at him with the long skewer of its beak. Already Jack could see the caption under his picture: Shish-Kebab for Breakfast!

  Only ten feet away the heron stopped in its tracks to cock its head sideways and give Jack a long, level stare. Jack made one last adjustment for focus, then snapped the shutter. At that moment of alignment between the eye of the heron, the lens of the camera, and Jack’s perfect and entire concentration, the halfling slipped across the diaphanous psychic barrier between bird and boy and took possession of his physical being.

  At first the halfling’s control was less than complete. Jack resisted the halfling’s will along whatever channels of volition remained open to him. He attempted to scream; the halfling constricted the muscles of his throat, and the scream became a dry little cough. He fought the halfling for control of his legs and fell sideways on the dewy grass, alarming the heron, which, regaining its autonomy in the instant Jack lost his, took to the air with a yawp of fear.

  The heron’s flight was the last image to reach Jack through his own eyes. One by one the halfling sealed off the avenues of sense. Jack felt himself plunged into the black well of his unconscious. Struggle was useless. The waters closed over him, and his mind drifted in a confusion amounting to terror, in a featureless void, a mote of uncomprehending consciousness in an ocean without surface or shore.

  CHAPTER 48

  Mr. Beck did not suppose he was dying. If his doctor, his wife, or his daughter Dorothy had told him they knew him to be dying, he would have refused to believe them. For some patients it was enough to have been brought to the hospital for the fear of death to be set jangling; for others it was more like getting the cap off a particularly obdurate bottle of syrup; but for those like Mr. Beck, nothing would serve the purpose short of death itself. It was not that Mr. Beck possessed any superabundance of faith or joie de vivre, nor was it stupidity, precisely. If his insensibility on the subject of death could be ascribed to any cause, it would have to be good manners. Death was not something one spoke of, except after the fact, to extend one’s sympathy to those presumed to be bereaved.

  Mrs. Beck and Dorothy entirely approved of Mr. Beck’s deportment in these potentially embarrassing circumstances. They would have been very much at a loss for words, should his spirit have awakened from its lifelong enchanted slumber. In his hospital bed he could slumber on right to the end, which need not, therefore, be bitter. He was well insured. The mortgage was paid. Admittedly, no money had been set aside for tuition, but Dorothy made it clear that she regarded college in much the same way her father looked on the afterlife—a place she knew of by hearsay but did not intend to go to.

  On the Tuesday that Mr. Beck was murdered, Mrs. Beck came to the hospital at 10 A.M. and sat by her husband’s side for forty-five minutes. Before she took up her knitting, and he his copy of the Tribune, she asked him if he had slept well. He said he had. In fact, he had been having nightmares ever since, on Sunday, the man with the bandaged head had been moved into the other corner of the room. It was not a private room (Mr. Beck’s hospitalization did not allow for that degree of luxury), and so he had no right to complain. But he did not like to look at the man, inert in his bed, and he knew that his presence was somehow connected wi
th these nightmares. But how could he have explained this to his wife? The dreams were forgotten within moments of his waking, all but the lingering sense of straining for breath.

  Sometime after his wife left, the priest, who had come by yesterday to sit beside the man with the bandaged head, came by again. He asked Mr. Beck if his friend—that is, the mummified Mr. Anker—had showed signs of consciousness yet. No, said Mr. Beck, he hadn’t. Then he asked Mr. Beck if there was anything he could do for him, and Mr. Beck said yes, would he be so kind as to draw the room-dividing curtain about his corner of the room and would he also turn the television set on. It was time for Bowling for Dollars on Channel 7. The old priest obliged him in this, and for several minutes Mr. Beck watched contentedly as one after another of the contestants failed to bowl so much as a single strike. Behind the double screen of the shimmery blue curtain and the noise of clattering pins and the boisterous announcer it was possible to ignore the old priest as he muttered over his rosary. Then, as Doug Koskinen of Rochester, Minnesota, was preparing to pick up a spare, the priest could be heard to shout something, and this was followed by bumpings and thumpings. On the TV screen four of the five needful pins went sprawling, and the audience made a sympathetic groan of disappointment.

  “Is something wrong?” Mr. Beck called out. Whereupon the curtain screening Mr. Beck’s corner of the room parted—or more exactly was torn down from its runners—and the old priest, clutching the curtain in both hands and bleeding over it profusely, fell across the foot of Mr. Beck’s bed. The blood came in spurts from a wound in his throat.

  So alarmed was Mr. Beck by the sight of the bleeding priest that he did not even notice the lurch of his bed as it was pushed out from the wall. Nor did he think, until it was too late, to reach for the button that would have summoned the nurse. He became aware of the cord about his neck only as it was drawn tight, just as it had been drawn tight in his forgotten—and now remembered—dream.

  For the first time Mr. Beck knew that he was dying, and he could feel, at last, an appropriate response. “No!” he screamed, “Please! Stop!” as fear and terror shattered his fragile and unevolved soul into a million and a million silvery particles, shards of an order that would never be restored. Before his lungs had drawn their last breath, before his heart had stopped beating, Mr. Beck had ceased to be.

  CHAPTER 49

  The name of the cemetery—Elysian Fields—was spelled out in curlicue wrought-iron letters over the entrance gate. The cemetery itself was so beautiful it took Joy-Ann’s breath away. There were marble statues of angels, immense flower beds, geysering fountains, ivy-draped chapels, and lovely white temples, like miniature banks, on the faraway hills. Beyond those hills, in the mistier distance, were other hills, and even a hint beyond that mistiness of further expanses, as though the cemetery were limitless, as though no one had ever come to heaven except to be buried here in heaven’s infinite cemetery.

  Carrying her tribute of red roses mixed with white, Joy-Ann followed Adah Menken down the gravel path to the grave of her friend and former neighbor, Alice Hoffman. Every time Joy-Ann thought of how she’d seen Alice at McCarron’s Funeral Home crying her eyes out over Joy-Ann’s own corpse, she would get misty-eyed and mournful, but when she tried to elicit other memories of Alice from the deeper past, memory would not oblige her with suitable mementos. Ungratefully, her thoughts would be diverted from the grief she ought to have felt at Alice’s demise to the general paradox of how people could still die even after they’d gone to heaven.

  Pretty as the cemetery was, no effort was made to obscure the central fact on which all cemeteries are based, the fact that people die and must be tucked somewhere out of sight to decompose. When they reached Alice’s plot they found that her casket had already been lowered into the neatly dug grave. At the side of the grave a blank headstone waited to be put into place: in eternity the dead are dispossessed even of names and dates.

  Joy-Ann placed her roses in a vase at the foot of the grave, but Adah remained for a while in a pensive pose, clutching the flowers to her breast and shedding tears of all-purpose sorrow for the human condition. They couldn’t have been for Alice Hoffman specifically (Joy-Ann reasoned), since Adah hadn’t laid eyes on Alice till the night of the fatal séance. Yet it couldn’t be denied that, whatever her inspiration, Adah mourned beautifully. With her roses and her monumental black gown she might have been the winning contestant in a funereal beauty pageant.

  “I just don’t understand,” Joy-Ann said, as she had so many times before. “I just do not understand. Why did she come to heaven at all if she was only going to die when she got here?”

  “Now I explained all that before,” said Adah in the soothing, anchorperson tone she reserved for lecturing. “She hasn’t died; she’s been transmogrified.”

  “Into a hydrangea!” Joy-Ann protested. “What kind of life is that after you’ve been a human being?”

  “I daresay I wouldn’t want to become a hydrangea, and you wouldn’t, but evidently it’s what Alice was best adapted for. If she’d had a livelier nature, she might have been reincarnated as a cat or a dog. Or if she’d had a larger appetite, she might have become a pig or a shark. Or if she’d taken an interest in sex, she might have changed into a pigeon or a rabbit.”

  “But why must she be reincarnated at all? We weren’t. It doesn’t seem fair.”

  “Who ever suggested that heaven is fair? Is predestination fair, would you say? Or the gift of grace (so amply bestowed on you)? Is it fair that someone like John Berryman should be smothered in laurels while my poetry has never once been reprinted since my death? Is that fair?”

  “But you did admit to me, finally, that you thought he had more sheer talent, a bigger imagination.”

  “And is that fair? Of course not, it’s the greatest inequity of all. But there you put your finger on what it is that separates the sheep from the goats, and vice versa: imagination. Those who possess it have an afterlife; those who don’t possess it, or in whom it has greatly atrophied, are reborn as plants or animals. It’s as simple, and unfair, as that. You could almost say that heaven is no more than a fantasm generated by the excess energies of the pooled imaginations of the blessed. Surely that would hold true for this level. Higher up and nearer God, imagination becomes less important. Or rather it’s taken for granted. But here in Paradise it is the sine qua non.”

  “The what?”

  “The without-which-nothing. Without which your friend Alice was unable to imagine herself into a heavenly existence.”

  “In that case why did she come to heaven at all?”

  “Because in the natural order of things Alice Hoffman would not have died such a brutal death. She would simply have vanished into a coma in a comfortable hospital bed. So by way of remedying that departure from the norm she was allowed a second, more suitable death in Paradise with a friend at hand. Your daughter’s case is rather similar. Not that she was destined to be reborn as a hydrangea. On the contrary, in the natural order of her life she was destined to become a saint.”

  “Giselle?” Joy-Ann laughed. “What kind of saint? The patron saint of casinos?”

  “Saints are usually a little incongruous. But my point is that her career of sanctity was nipped in the bud, and before she can get where she was going—up in the higher spheres of heaven where saints congregate—she has to complete the job.”

  “How?”

  Adah shrugged. “If I could tell you that I’d be a saint myself, and not the custodian of all these—” She made a broad, dismissive gesture that encompassed all the, mellow, melancholy vistas of the endless cemetery. “—stage sets.”

  Joy-Ann shook her head in mild reproof of Adah’s disparaging tone. To call this beautiful cemetery a stage set!

  “You understand, don’t you,” said Adah, “that none of this actually exists. It’s a function of our two imaginations; a work of collaboration, so to speak; a shared metaphor.”

  “Alice Hoffman wasn’t killed by a met
aphor. That demon, or whatever it was, got hold of poor little Sugar and took possession of him just like in that movie The Exorcist.”

  “Yes. Unfortunately in the spiritual realm it is possible to inherit acquired characteristics.”

  “There you go,” Joy-Ann sniffed, “talking over my head again.”

  “Which is to say that the powers of the ring you gave to Giselle and which she was wearing through most of her pregnancy were passed on to her offspring. And since the thing was a kind of half-breed in any case, being fathered by a living human being, I’m afraid its capabilities are rather extensive. Though not limitless. It could not, for instance, take possession of an adult human being. Sexual maturity acts as a kind of sealant.”

  “But what is to become of things down there with that creature going around murdering anyone it takes a fancy to? How can God allow something like that?”

  Adah sighed and lowered a dark veil that had been piled in decorative billows about the wide brim of her black straw hat. “That, Joy-Ann, is a question you will have to address directly to the Almighty. I confess I’ve never been so near His throne that I could get a clear and unequivocal answer to any of the classic dilemmas. Why does He allow innocent children to suffer? Ask Him that!”