He braced his hands on the sink and leaned close to the mirror, fascinated by the way a living man’s face could so resemble a dead man’s. He hardly trusted his own eyes in the mirror; were they Arlen Wagner’s or Isaac Wagner’s?
The sight of the undertaker’s shop came back to him then, the coffins lining the wall, the sound of his father’s chisel working the wood, shaping final homes. And his voice… his conversations. With them. With the dead.
Arlen shook his head, ran water over his hands and splashed it onto his face, blinking it out of his eyes. He kept his head turned away from the mirror and went downstairs in search of his razor.
Yes, it was time to shave.
He was drunk by the time they finished working. Sitting back by the fireplace, talking to himself with his head down on the table. Eventually Paul came over and told Arlen he needed to lie down.
“Go on, then,” Arlen said, that or something close to it, but evidently the boy had been referring to him, because he got his hands under Arlen’s arms and heaved him to his feet. Arlen didn’t like that, and he tried to shove him away and prove that he could stand on his own two, thank you very much. When he did it, though, he knocked the ladder-back chair over and tripped on its legs, would’ve sprawled right into the fireplace if Paul hadn’t caught him. He stopped struggling then, let the boy wrestle him upright and leaned his weight onto the kid’s side as they moved across the room. Rebecca Cady stood behind the bar in front of the electric fan, drying her hair and dress, and she watched Arlen with knowing eyes. He grinned at her, a wide, mocking smile. It earned no response.
The stairs were difficult, but Arlen had traversed stairs on unsteady legs before, and this time he had Paul to help. At the top, he stopped and gripped the railing because the building had taken to tilting and swirling around him, and he thought it prudent to hold off on any further steps. Paul kept pushing him ahead, though, down the hallway and past the bathroom, and then he opened one of the closed doors and guided Arlen into a hot, dusty room with a bed. It was stifling, and Arlen growled at the boy to open the window, let some air in.
“It’s boarded up. They’re all boarded up.”
That was foolishness; why in the hell would anybody put boards over a window in a place so hellish hot as this? Arlen was ready to raise the question when the boy stepped out from under him and let him tumble down onto the bed, and it was soft, so soft. He forgot his planned remark and pulled himself higher on the bed, using his elbows to move, got his boots kicked off.
“We’re leaving,” he said.
“Not yet,” Paul said.
“No, I’ll rest, but then… we’re leaving, Paul. Got to leave. Got to.”
Paul was standing in the doorway, staring at him with a frown. “Those men from the train… they died in the storm, didn’t they, Arlen?”
Arlen looked into the kid’s eyes and for a moment felt as if he’d stared his way into some small circle of sobriety. The men from the train. Wallace O’Connell and the rest who’d climbed back on board with laughter on their lips… yes, they were dead.
“You already asked me that,” Arlen mumbled.
“I know it. And you said you didn’t think they were dead, but honestly you’re sure of it. That night at the station, you were right.”
The kid had begun to shift in front of Arlen’s eyes, tilting first one way and then the other, and there were three or four versions of him now, each one staring with intense eyes.
“How did you?” Paul said. “How in the hell did you know?”
Arlen flopped his head back down on the bed and squeezed his eyes shut. “Go away. Lemme sleep.”
Paul didn’t say anything. There was no sound from the doorway, and after enough time had passed Arlen was sure he’d left, but then he heard a footstep followed by the thud of the door swinging shut and knew the kid had been standing there the whole time, staring at him.
How in the hell did you know?
He just knew, damn it. Wasn’t a thing could be said to explain it; Arlen Wagner saw the dead, knew when the hour tolled and the lives of men both friend and stranger would come to a close.
They didn’t have to die, he thought. The selfish bastards. All I can do is give a word of warning. The boy believed me simply because he is a boy. Grown men aren’t allowed to believe such tales, even when they must. Even when it’s all that can save them, they won’t allow themselves to believe.
He thought of Walt Sorenson leaning close to him at the roadhouse the night they’d met, that story of the fortune-teller who’d seen death in the rain and told him to be aware of travelers in need.
He might have believed, Arlen thought. He was one of the few who might have believed, and I didn’t see a damn thing before he died. Couldn’t warn him.
Why couldn’t he? The man had died; Arlen had watched his body burn, had seen his flesh melt from his bones. Why hadn’t Arlen been offered any warning? Why hadn’t he looked into Sorenson’s eyes and seen smoke?
It’s this place, he thought. There’s something wrong with this place. Death hides here, even from me.
The Cypress House, it was called. The Cypress House. That brought back memories, too. Not of a highway tavern, though. No, no. The cypress houses of Arlen’s youth had been quite different than that. They’d been houses of
death
another sort entirely. The last Pope was in one now. Every Pope who’d passed on was, as far as Arlen knew. Always would be. Cypress wood was required in the sacred burial rites of many faiths in many lands. The branches of the trees themselves were symbols of
death
mourning. Arlen’s father had carved them many times. The trees were not an uncommon symbol among German gravestones. The leaves stayed evergreen even after the tree had been felled, and this was believed to be a sign of spiritual immortality, a representation of the insignificance of the body’s passing. It went back to the Romans or the Greeks or some such, went back countless years, this idea of the cypress as an emblem of
death
morbid significance. What a terrible name for an inn. The Cypress House. He was edging toward sleep in a cypress house. He was edging toward-
death a coffin sleep in a cypress house death you are edging toward death
“We’re leaving soon as we can,” Arlen said, speaking to no one. “Soon as we can, we’re going home.” Then he brought his hands up and dropped them over his face, because keeping his eyes shut in this room with the boarded-up windows still didn’t offer enough darkness.
12
HIS SLEEP WAS RESTLESS and oppressive, the tossing-and-turning, half-conscious slumber of a drunk. Dreams blurred with reality, and coherent thoughts spun a tangled dance with dark visions and memories. Men with skeletal faces leered at him, then vanished and turned back into the dark walls of the room before another blink conjured up a rattlesnake coiled on a slab of West Virginia stone and another brought forth a slick of burgundy liquid on soil in France, mustard gas after it had settled to earth.
He heard Paul’s voice and Rebecca Cady’s and tried to listen to them, but they became his father’s voice and then Edwin Main’s, the man who’d come to kill his father many years ago. Life was rushing past, stacking days upon days, but still some things wouldn’t stay buried. Not Isaac’s face, not his voice.
You’re all I have in this world, son, that death can’t take. This world isn’t anything but a sojourn, to be sure, but death removes every trace unless you’ve taken pains to leave one behind. You’re my trace, Arlen.
Isaac Wagner’s bearded face split into a smile of crooked teeth, and he started a laugh that ended in a howl. The howl went on and on, a howl of madness, a howl of… wind.