It was like the fist of God — if His fist was ever green, mind — punching down from Heaven and smashing right through her roof. The whole house just flew apart, the roof blew off, the windows turned to glittery dust, and the log walls splintered into matchwood. The force of it was so strong that it just plain sucked the air out of the fire, like blowing out a candle.
Patrick started running about then, and since he has two legs and I got this peg I followed along as best I could. Took us maybe ten minutes to get all the way down there.
By that time Sophie Kilpatrick was deader’n a doornail.
We stopped outside the jagged edge of what had been her north wall and stared at her just lying there amid the wreckage. Her bed was smashed flat, the legs broke; the dresser and rocker were in pieces, all the crockery in fragments. In the midst of it, still wearing her white nightgown and bonnet, was Sophie, her arms and legs spread like a starfish, her mouth open like a bass, her goggle eyes staring straight up at Heaven in the most accusing sort of way.
We exchanged a look and crept inside.
“She looks dead,” he said.
“Of course she’s dead, Pat, a comet done just fell on her.”
The fire was out but there was still a bit of green glow coming off her and we crept closer still.
“What in tarnation is that?”
“Dunno,” I said. There were bits and pieces of green rock scattered around her, and it glowed like it had a light inside. Kind of pulsed in a way, like a slow heartbeat. Sophie was dusted with glowing green powder. It was on her gown and her hands and her face. A little piece of the rock pulsed inside her mouth, like she’d gasped it in as it all happened.
“What’s that green stuff?”
“Must be that comet they been talking about in the papers. Biela’s Comet they been calling it.”
“Why’d it fall on Sophie?”
“Well, Pat, I don’t think it meant to.”
He grunted as he stared down at her. The green pulsing of the rock made it seem like she was breathing and a couple of times he bent close to make sure.
“Damn,” he said after he checked the third time, “I didn’t think she’d ever die. Didn’t think she could!”
“God kills everything,” I said, quoting one of Father Callahan’s cheerier observations. “Shame it didn’t fall on Mean-Dog Mulligan.”
“Yeah, but I thought Sophie was too damn ornery to die. Besides, I always figured the Devil’d do anything he could to keep her alive.”
I looked at him. “Why’s that?”
“He wouldn’t want the competition. You know she ain’t going to Heaven and down in Hell…well, she’ll be bossing around old Scratch and his demons before her body is even cold in the grave. Ain’t nobody could be as persistently disagreeable as Aunt Sophie.”
“Amen to that,” I said and sucked some whiskey out of my sleeve. Pat noticed what I was doing and asked for a taste. I held my arm out to him. “So…what you think we should do?”
Pat looked around. The fire was out, but the house was a ruin. “We can’t leave her out here.”
“We can call the constable,” I suggested. “Except that we both smell like whiskey.”
“I think we should take her up to the house, Peg.”
I stared at him. “To the house? She weighs nigh on half a ton.”
“She can’t be more than three hundred-weight. Catherine will kill me if I leave her out here to get gnawed on by every creature in the woods. She always says I was too hard on Sophie, too mean to her. She sees me bringing Sophie’s body home, sees how I cared enough to do that for her only living aunt, then she’ll think better of me.”
“Oh, man….” I complained, but Pat was adamant. Besides, when he was in his cups Pat complained that Catherine was not being very “wifely” lately. I think he was hoping that this would somehow charm him back onto Catherine’s side of the bed. Mind you, Pat was as drunk as a lord, so this made sense to him, and I was damn near pickled, so it more or less made sense to me, too. Father Callahan could have gotten a month’s worth of hellfire sermons on the dangers of hard liquor out of the way Pat and I handled this affair. Of course, Father Callahan’s dead now, so there’s that.
Anyway, we wound up doing as Pat said and we near busted our guts picking up Sophie and slumping her onto a wheelbarrow. We dusted off the green stuff as best we could, but we forgot about the piece in her mouth and the action of dumping her on the ’barrow must have made that glowing green chunk slide right down her gullet. If we’d been a lot less drunk we’d have wondered about that, because on some level I was pretty sure I heard her swallow that chunk, but since she was dead and we were grunting and cursing trying to lift her, and it couldn’t be real anyway, I didn’t comment on it. All I did once she was loaded was peer at her for a second to see if that great big bosom of hers was rising and falling — which it wasn’t — and then I took another suck on my sleeve.
It took near two hours to haul her fat ass up the hill and through the streets and down to Pat’s little place on DeKoven Street. All the time I found myself looking queer at Sophie. I hadn’t liked that sound, that gulping sound, even if I wasn’t sober or ballsy enough to say anything to Pat. It made me wonder, though, about that glowing green piece of comet. What the hell was that stuff, and where’d it come from? It weren’t nothing normal, that’s for sure.
We stood out in the street for a bit with Pat just staring at his own front door, mopping sweat from his face, careful of the bruises from Mean-Dog. “I can’t bring her in like this,” he said, “it wouldn’t be right.”
“Let’s put her in the cowshed,” I suggested. “Lay her out on the straw and then we can fetch the doctor. Let him pronounce her dead all legal like.”
For some reason that sounded sensible to both of us, so that’s what we did. Neither of us could bear to try and lift her again so we tipped over the barrow and let her tumble out.
“Ooof!” she said.
“Excuse me,” Pat said, and then we both froze.
He looked at me, and I looked at him, and we both looked at Aunt Sophie. My throat was suddenly as dry as an empty shot glass.
Pat’s face looked like he’d seen a ghost and we were both wondering if that’s what we’d just seen in fact. We crouched over her, me still holding the arms of the barrow, him holding one of Sophie’s wrists.
“Tell me if you feel a pulse, Paddy my lad,” I whispered.
“Not a single thump,” he said.
“Then did you hear her say ‘ooof’ or some suchlike?”
“I’d be lying if I said I didn’t.”
“Lying’s not always a sin,” I observed.
He dropped her wrist, then looked at the pale green dust on his hands — the glow had faded — and wiped his palms on his coveralls.
“Is she dead or isn’t she?” I asked.
He bent and with great reluctance pressed his ear to her chest. He listened for a long time. “There’s no ghost of a heartbeat,” he said.
“Be using a different word now, will ya?”
Pat nodded. “There’s no heartbeat. No breath, nothing.”
“Then she’s dead?”
“Aye.”
“But she made a sound.”
Pat straightened, then snapped his fingers. “It’s the death rattle,” he said. “Sure and that’s it. The dead exhaling a last breath.”
“She’s been dead these two hours and more. What’s she been waiting for?”
He thought about that. “It was the stone. The green stone — it lodged in her throat and blocked the air. We must have dislodged it when we dumped her out and that last breath came out. Just late is all.”
I was beginning to sober up and that didn’t have the ring of logic it would have had an hour ago.