"I'll be waiting," Buck called after her as she stumbled across the walkway and into the storm. "You hear me, bitch? I'll be waiting!"
He wasn't going to humiliate himself with a pursuit. She would have to come back, wouldn't she? And he, invisible to all but the woman, could afford to bide his time. If she told her companions what she'd seen they'd call her crazy; maybe lock her up where he could have her all to himself. No, he had a winner here. She would return soaked to the skin, her dress clinging to her in a dozen fetching ways; panicky perhaps; tearful; too weak to resist his overtures. They'd make music then. Oh yes. Until she begged him to stop.
SADIE followed Laura May out.
"Where are you going?" Milton asked his daughter, but she didn't reply. "Jesus!" he shouted after her, registering what he'd seen. "Where'd you get the goddamn gun?"
The rain was torrential. It beat on the ground, on the last leaves of the cottonwood, on the roof, on the skull. It flattened Laura May's hair in seconds, pasting it to her forehead and neck.
"Earl?" she yelled. "Where are you? Earl?" She began to run across the lot, yelling his name as she went. The rain had turned the dust to a deep brown mud; it slopped up against her shins. She crossed to the other building. A number of guests, already woken by Gyer's barrage, watched her from their windows. Several doors were open. One man, standing on the walkway with a beer in his hand, demanded to know what was going on. "People running around like crazies," he said. "All this yelling. We came here for some privacy for Christ's sake." A girl-fully twenty years his junior-emerged from the room behind the beer drinker. "She's got a gun, Dwayne," she said. "See that?"
"Where did they go?" Laura May asked the beer drinker.
"Who?" Dwayne replied.
"The crazies!" Laura May yelled back above another peal of thunder.
"They went around the back of the office," Dwayne said, his eyes on the gun rather than Laura May. "They're not here. Really they're not."
Laura May doubled back toward the office building. The rain and lightning were blinding, and she had difficulty keeping her balance in the swamp underfoot.
"Earl!" she called. "Are you there?"
Sadie kept pace with her. The Cade woman had pluck, no doubt of that, but there was an edge of hysteria in her voice which Sadie didn't like too much. This kind of business (murder) required detachment. The trick was to do it almost casually, as you might flick on the radio, or swat a mosquito. Panic would only cloud the issue; passion the same. Why, when she'd raised that .38 and pointed it at Buck there'd been no anger to spoil her aim, not a trace. In the final analysis, that was why they'd sent her to the chair. Not for doing it, but for doing it too well.
Laura May was not so cool. Her breath had become ragged, and from the way she sobbed Earl's name as she ran it was clear she was close to the breaking point. She rounded the back of the office building, where the motel sign threw a cold light on the waste ground, and this time, when she called for Earl, there was an answering cry. She stopped, peering through the veil of rain. It was Earl's voice, as she'd hoped, but he wasn't calling to her.
"Bastard!" he was yelling, "you're out of your mind. Let me alone!"
Now she could make out two figures in the middle distance. Earl, his paunchy torso spattered and streaked with mud, was on his knees in among the soap weed and the scrub. Gyer stood over him, his hands on Earl's head, pressing it down toward the earth.
"Admit your crime, sinner!"
"Damn you, no!"
"You came to destroy my crusade. Admit it! Admit it!"
"Go to hell!"
"Confess your complicity, or so help me I'll break every bone in your body!"
Earl fought to be free of Gyer, but the evangelist was easily the stronger of the two men.
"Pray!" he said, pressing Earl's face into the mud. "Pray!"
"Go fuck yourself," Earl shouted back.
Gyer dragged Earl's head up by the hair, his other hand raised to deliver a blow to the upturned face. But before he could strike, Laura May entered the fray, taking three or four steps through the dirt toward them, the .38 held in her quaking hands.
"Get away from him," she demanded.
Sadie calmly noted that the woman's aim was not all it could be. Even in clear weather she was probably no sharpshooter. But here, under stress, in such a downpour, who but the most experienced marksman could guarantee the outcome? Gyer turned and looked at Laura May. He showed not a flicker of apprehension. He's made the same calculation I've just made, Sadie thought. He knows damn well the odds are against him getting harmed.
"The whore!" Gyer announced, turning his eyes heavenward. "Do you see her, Lord? See her shame, her depravity? Mark her! She is one of the court of Babylon!"
Laura May didn't quite comprehend the details, but the general thrust of Gyer's outburst was perfectly clear. "I'm no whore!" she yelled back, the .38 almost leaping in her hand as if eager to be fired. "Don't you dare call me a whore!"
"Please, Laura May..." Earl said, wrestling with Gyer to get a look at the woman, ". . . get out of here. He's lost his mind."
She ignored the imperative.
"If you don't let go of him she said, pointing the gun at the man in black.
"Yes?" Gyer taunted her. "What will you do, whore?"
"I'll shoot! I will! I'll shoot."
OVER on the other side of the office building Virginia spotted one of the pill bottles Gyer had thrown out into the mud. She stooped to pick it up and then thought better of the idea. She didn't need pills any more, did she? She'd spoken to a dead man. Her very touch had made Buck Durning visible to her. What a skill that was! Her visions were real, and always had been; more true than all the secondhand revelations her pitiful husband could spout. What could pills do but befuddle this newfound talent? Let them lie.
A number of guests had now donned jackets and emerged from their rooms to see what the commotion was all about.
"Has there been an accident?" a woman called to Virginia. As the words left her lips a shot sounded.
"John," Virginia said.
Before the echoes of the shot had died she was making her way toward their source. She already pictured what she would find there: her husband laid flat on the ground; the triumphant assassin taking to his muddied heels. She picked up her pace, a prayer coming as she ran. She prayed not that the scenario she had imagined was wrong, but rather that God would forgive her for willing it to be true.
The scene she found on the other side of the building confounded all her expectations. The evangelist was not dead. He was standing, untouched. It was Earl who lay flat on the miry ground beside him. Close by stood the woman who'd come with the ice water hours earlier. She had a gun in her hand. It still smoked. Even as Virginia's eyes settled on Laura May a figure stepped through the rain and struck the weapon from the woman's hand. It fell to the ground. Virginia followed the descent. Laura May looked startled. She clearly didn't understand how she'd come to drop the gun. Virginia knew, however. She could see the phantom, albeit fleetingly, and she guessed its identity. This was surely Sadie Durning, she whose defiance had christened this establishment the Slaughterhouse of Love.
Laura May's eyes found Earl. She let out a cry of horror and ran towards him.
"Don't be dead, Earl. I beg you, don't be dead!"
Earl looked up from the mud bath he'd taken and shook his head.
"Missed me by a mile," he said.
At his side, Gyer had fallen to his knees, hands clasped together, face up to the driving rain.
"Oh Lord, I thank you for preserving this your instrument, in his hour of need..."
Virginia shut out the idiot drivel. This was the man who had convinced her so deeply of her own deluded state that she'd given herself to Buck Durning. Well, no more. She'd been terrorized enough. She'd seen Sadie act upon the real world; she'd felt Buck do the same. The time was now ripe to reverse the procedure. She walked steadily across to where the .38 lay in the grass and picked it up.
> As she did so, she sensed the presence of Sadie Durning close by. A voice, so soft she barely heard it, said, "Is this wise?" in her ear. Virginia didn't know the answer to that question. What was wisdom anyhow? Not the stale rhetoric of dead prophets, certainly. Maybe wisdom was Laura May and Earl, embracing in the mud, careless of the prayers Gyer was spouting, or of the stares of the guests who'd come running out to see who'd died. Or perhaps wisdom was finding the canker in your life and rooting it out once and for all. Gun in hand, she headed back toward Room Seven, aware that the benign presence of Sadie Durning walked at her side.
"Not Buck...?" Sadie whispered, "...surely not."
"He attacked me," Virginia said.
"You poor lamb."
"I'm no lamb," Virginia replied. "Not anymore."
Realizing that the woman was perfectly in charge of her destiny, Sadie hung back, fearful that her presence would alert Buck. She watched as Virginia crossed the lot, past the cottonwood tree, and stepped into the room where her tormentor had said he would be waiting. The lights still burned, bright after the blue darkness outside. There was no sign of Durning. Virginia crossed to the interconnecting door. Room Eight was deserted too. Then, the familiar voice.
"You came back," Buck said.
She wheeled around, hiding the gun from him. He had emerged from the bathroom and was standing between her and the door.
"I knew you'd come back," be said to her. "They always do."
"I want you to show yourself-" Virginia said.
"I'm naked as a babe as it is," said Buck, "what do you want me to do: skin myself? Might be fun, at that."
"Show yourself to John, my husband. Make him see his error."
"Oh, poor John. I don't think he wants to see me, do you?"
"He thinks I'm insane."
"Insanity can be very useful," Buck smirked, "they almost saved Sadie from Old Sparky on a plea of insanity. But she was too honest for her own good. She just kept telling them, over and over: 'I wanted him dead. So I shot him.' She never had much sense. But you... now, I think you know what's best for you."
The shadowy form shifted. Virginia couldn't quite make out what Durning was doing with himself but it was unequivocally obscene.
"Come and get it, Virginia," he said, "grub's up."
She took the .38 from behind her back and leveled it at him.
"Not this time," she said.
"You can't do me any harm with that," he replied. "I'm already dead, remember?"
"You hurt me. Why shouldn't I be able to hurt you back?"
Buck shook his ethereal head, letting out a low laugh. As he was so engaged the wail of police sirens rose from down the highway.
"Well, what do you know?" Buck said. "Such a fuss and commotion. We'd better get down to some jazzing, honey, before we get interrupted."
"I warn you, this is Sadie's gun-"You wouldn't hurt me," Buck murmured. "I know you
women. You say one thing and you mean the opposite." He stepped toward her, laughing.
"Don't," she warned.
He took another step, and she pulled the trigger. In the instant before she heard the sound, and felt the gun leap in her hand, she saw John appear in the doorway. Had he been there all along, or was he coming out of the rain, prayers done, to read Revelations to his erring wife? She would never know The bullet sliced through Buck, dividing the smoky body as it went, and sped with perfect accuracy toward the evangelist. He didn't see it coming. It struck him in the throat, and blood came quickly, splashing down his shirt. Buck's form dissolved like so much dust, and he was gone. Suddenly there was nothing in Room Seven but Virginia, her dying husband and the sound of the rain.
John Gyer frowned at Virginia, then reached out for the door frame to support his considerable bulk. He failed to secure it, and fell backward out of the door like a toppled statue, his face washed by the rain. The blood did not stop coming however. It poured out in gleeful spurts; and it was still pumping when Alvin Baker and his deputy arrived outside the room, guns at the ready.
Now her husband would never know, she thought. That was the pity of it. He could never now be made to concede his stupidity and recant his arrogance. Not this side of the grave, anyhow. He was safe, damn him, and she was left with a smoking gun in her hand and God alone knew what price to pay.
"Put down the gun and come out of there!" The voice from the lot sounded harsh and uncompromising.
Virginia didn't answer.
"You hear me, in there? This is Sheriff Baker. The place is surrounded, so come on out, or you're dead."
Virginia sat on the bed and weighed up the alternatives. They wouldn't execute her for what she'd done, the way they had Sadie. But she'd be in prison for a long time, and she was tired of regimes. If she wasn't mad now, incarceration would push her to the brink and over. Better to finish here, she thought. She put the warm .38 under her chin, tilting it to make sure the shot would take off the top of her skull.
"Is that wise?" Sadie inquired, as Virginia's finger tightened.
"They'll lock me away," she replied. "I couldn't face that."
"True," said Sadie. "They'll put you behind bars for a while. But it won't be for long."
"You must be joking. I just shot my husband in cold blood."
"You didn't mean to," Sadie said brightly, "you were aiming at Buck."
"Was I?" Virginia said. "I wonder."
"You can plead insanity, the way I should have done. Just make up the most outrageous story you can and stick to it." Virginia shook her head; she'd never been much of a liar. "And when you're set free," Sadie went on, "you'll be notorious. That's worth living for, isn't it?"
Virginia hadn't thought of that. The ghost of a smile illuminated her face. From outside, Sheriff Baker repeated his demand that she throw her weapon through the door and come out with her hands high.
"You've got ten seconds, lady," he said, "and I mean ten."
"I can't face the humiliation," Virginia murmured. "I can't."
Sadie shrugged. "Pity," she said. "The rain's clearing. There's a moon.
"A moon? Really?"
Baker had started counting.
"You have to make up your mind," Sadie said. "They'll shoot you given half the chance. And gladly."
Baker had reached eight. Virginia stood up.
"Stop," she called through the door.
Baker stopped counting. Virginia threw out the gun. It landed in the mud.
"Good," said Sadie. "I'm so pleased."
"I can't go alone," Virginia replied.
"No need."
A sizeable audience had gathered in the lot: Earl and Laura May of course, Milton Cade, Dwayne and his girl, Sheriff Baker and his deputy, an assortment of motel guests. They stood in respectful silence, staring at Virginia Gyer with mingled expressions of bewilderment and awe.
"Put your hands up where I can see them!" Baker said. Virginia did as she was instructed.
"Look," said Sadie, pointing.
The moon was up, wide and white.
"Why'd you kill him?" Dwayne's girl asked.
"The Devil made me do it," Virginia replied, gazing up at the moon and putting on the craziest smile she could muster.
DOWN, SATAN!
CIRCUMSTANCES HAD made Gregorius rich beyond all calculation. He owned fleets and palaces; stallions;
cities Indeed he owned so much that to those who were finally charged with enumerating his possessions-when the events of this story reached their monstrous conclusion-it sometimes seemed it might be quicker to list the items Gregorius did not own.
Rich he was, but far from happy. He had been raised a Catholic, and in his early years-before his dizzying rise to fortune-he'd found succor in his faith. But he'd neglected it, and it was only at the age of fifty-five, with the world at his feet, that he woke one night and found himself Godless.
It was a bitter blow, but he immediately took steps to make good his loss. He went to Rome and spoke with the Supreme Pontiff; he prayed night and day
; he founded seminaries and leper colonies. God, however, declined to show so much as His toenail. Gregorius, it seemed, was forsaken.
Almost despairing, he took it into his head that he could only win his way back into the arms of his Maker if he put his soul into the direst jeopardy. The notion had some merit. Suppose, he thought, I could contrive a meeting with Satan, the Archfiend. Seeing me in extremis, would not God be obliged to step in and deliver me back into the fold?
It was a fine plot, but how was he to realize it? The Devil did not just come at a call, even for a tycoon such as Gregorius, and his researches soon proved that all the traditional methods of summoning the Lord of Vermin-the defiling of the Blessed Sacrament, the sacrificing of babes-were no more effective than his good works had been at provoking Yahweh. It was only after a year of deliberation that he finally fell upon his master plan. He would arrange to have built a hell on earth-a modern inferno so monstrous that the Tempter would be tempted, and come to roost there like a cuckoo in a usurped nest.
He searched high and low for an architect and found, languishing in a madhouse outside Florence, a man called Leopardo, whose plans for Mussolini's palaces had a lunatic grandeur that suited Gregorius's project perfectly. Leopardo was taken from his cell-a fetid, wretched old man-and given his dreams again. His genius for the prodigious had not deserted him.
In order to fuel his invention the great libraries of the world were scoured for descriptions of hells both secular and metaphysical. Museum vaults were ransacked for forbidden images of martyrdom. No stone was left unturned if it was suspected something perverse was concealed beneath.
The finished designs owed something to de Sade and to Dante, and something more to Freud and Krafft-Ebing, but there was also much there that no mind had conceived of before, or at least ever dared set to paper.
A site in North Africa was chosen, and work on Gregorius's New Hell began. Everything about the project broke the records. Its foundations were vaster, its walls thicker, its plumbing more elaborate than any edifice hitherto attempted. Gregorius watched its slow construction with an enthusiasm he had not tasted since his first years as an empire builder. Needless to say, he was widely thought to have lost his mind. Friends he had known for years refused to associate with him. Several of his companies collapsed when investors took fright at reports of his insanity. He didn't care. His plan could not fail. The Devil would be bound to come, if only out of curiosity to see this leviathan built in his name, and when he did, Gregorius would be waiting.