“All right, Jason,” said Germaine. “You will have to hit me, because I’m not going to go quietly. What do you mean to do? Take the germe de grotte that’s in that room, smear it on me, and watch me die of bleeding from the ears?”
“I’m showing you what you showed my ma,” said Jason. “What you showed all of Cracked Wheel, with that germdeegrot. You murdered Cracked Wheel! The whole damn town!” Behind her, next to the doorway, the shadow nodded its head.
He didn’t cooperate. Not even with all the whiskey in him. My, my—but you’d think he would. He certainly did as he was told when Etherton got him drunk, and made him look off while he did his business.
“Are you paying attention to me, Nephew?”
Jason looked back down at her. Her face was beginning to swell where he’d hit her. Only half an eye managed to magnify in the glass.
“You’re not,” she said. “And you shouldn’t have to, because in the scheme of things, I am what? A childless old woman with index cards. One such as you shouldn’t grant someone like me the hour of the day. In the end, my contribution to greatness is secondhand. You, on the other hand—you should be fixed upon greater things.”
He half-raised his hand, but couldn’t manage it. Behind Germaine, the shadow grew agitated. But Jason couldn’t hear what it said.
“I’m sorry I brought you here, Jason. When I came—when I brought you—it was only because Bergstrom so grossly misrepresented his discovery here. Remember—I explained to you. Had I known…”
Jason found the strength. He hit Germaine again, knocking her glasses clear.
“You use devil words on me, you get this.” Then he grabbed her and pulled her up—her back bent on the shelf, so that it creaked on its rails. The shadows in the corners of the room danced, and murmured. A hinge creaked, so Jason could not hear the words. “I should have done this upstairs. First time you started talking. You think I was strong and a hero, but I should have done this.” He put one hand over her mouth, and the other elbow on her throat. “You can’t live, ’cause you’ll just kill more. Like you’d have killed Dr. Waggoner. Just to see.”
“That may be true, son.”
The shadows finally coalesced. Jason looked up.
He was tall, and he smelled of fire and heat. His face was half-blackened, the other half swollen in a great sore. His eyes, white and round, stared out at Jason as though from bare sockets. Around him, the lamp-lit walls of the autopsy seemed to melt, and growing from the shadows were the square-cut logs of the cabin in Montana.
“You,” breathed Jason.
“Jason,” he rasped, and coughed.
Hell had not been kind to old John Thistledown.
“What did you do with my ma?”
“I did nothing with your ma. Now this one—you said she murdered Cracked Wheel? She murdered your ma too, didn’t she?”
Jason stepped back, as the smells of that cabin—the hint of wood-smoke, the greasy smell of tallow from the candles lighting it, the pervasive scent of his mother—overcame him. His mother’s smell was there, but she wasn’t. Germaine Frost was crouched on her bed, cowering.
John Thistledown stood in the open door, swirls of snow around his burnt cadaver.
“She murdered everyone,” said Jason. He wanted to cower himself, but he put on a brave face. “You back from Hell to see what another murderer looks like?”
The elder Thistledown seemed to think about that, and finally he nodded. “You’re fixin’ to kill her,” he said. “To make her pay for all those other killings?”
“I am.”
“You given any thought to what price you’d pay, doing that? Killing a person?”
Jason looked at his father’s shade, and unbidden, a memory of him, hard and cold, looking down on the pass with his rifle in his lap, came up. “It was a price you were willing to pay.”
“And look what it did to me.”
“He’s right, Jason,” said Germaine. “Killing is not for one such as you—”
She didn’t finish. John Thistledown, as tall as a pine, swooped over her. His filthy, Hell-scorched hands took hold of her head. “Look away, boy,” said John, but Jason didn’t obey, and watched as an instant later, his father’s shade twisted his false aunt’s head hard to the right, and cracked it. Her hands shook, and then went limp.
Jason kept watching, as his father straightened and walked past him. “You’re right, Jason. Sometimes there’s got to be a killing. Sometimes it is right. But you’re better leaving it to a man with blood under his fingernails already. Keep your own clean for supper.”
He stepped around Jason, and through a door that Jason had never recalled in the back of the cabin. That, of course, was because there hadn’t been one. He was going into the storeroom, at the back of the autopsy. Where they had been all along.
Jason looked down at Germaine Frost. She had slid to the floor, her neck at an odd angle—her eyes tiny without their glasses.
“Goodbye son,” said his father as he came back from the storeroom. There was something in his hand… a jar, sealed in wax. “Best you stay put with that girl of yours. She can use the comfort. And what’s next—is something you don’t need to see, neither of you.”
And then John Thistledown stepped out into the hallway, and vanished.
Jason stared at that door for a long time, putting together what he’d seen—where he’d been. There was Germaine Frost, dead on the floor. Had he done that, possessed by the shade of his pa, come up from Hell to guide his hand in killing? What had he done with his ma?
“Jason?”
Jason looked around. Ruth stood trembling, at the door of the storeroom. Her eyes were dark, and she looked thinner in the lamplight. He went to her, deliberately blocking the view of Germaine Frost’s body, and took her in his arms.
She looked up at him.
“What was Sam Green doing here?” she asked.
29 - The Oracle Frets
The cathedral growled and hummed and came alive, as the Heavens dried up.
Inside its belly, acolytes stoked saw-scrap and wood shavings by the shovelful into the boiler; a plume of white smoke drifted from the high stack and across the town, where others crouched—their faces pressed into the mud of the road, or bent down as they clutched their chickens and pigs and bushels of apples—a proper offering to the God who now dwelt inside.
At the cathedral’s gate, the Oracle waited.
She let Lily lead the song; she was uneasy, as she surveyed the crowd of new worshippers as she sniffed at the bundle in her arms and hung back under the shadow of the roof. There were a lot of folk there—more than she’d seen before, and she wasn’t sure she liked all of them in such a great number. Were it up to her, she’d send the men-folk out to do a cull—whittle these families down to manageable sizes, feed the carcasses to the Son, like they already were with the false priests—that stinking old man, who’d climbed up a mountain and thought he’d be an Oracle because of it.
A false oracle.
The Oracle stood under an overhang of roof, at the back of a wide platform overlooking the square. Rainwater dribbled off the roof in front of her, like a waterfall. Lily let that water course over her as she sang, and the multitude sang too. They were supplicant, all right. But the Oracle felt a twang of doubt. It was one thing to sing and holler and tell kin—tell Feegers—that they needed to get off their behinds, take up their axes and bows and clubs, and take their Word on a crusade. Another entirely to tell these folk, who only now felt the touch of the Son on them.