The White Road

“Where is he?”

“Out back.”

As Bowen moved to pass him, Carlyle extended an arm to block his way.

“You eaten yet?”

“Not much.”

“Lucky you.”

The arm dropped. Bowen continued on around the side of the house until he came to an enclosed pen that had once been used to hold pigs. The stench of them still hung around it, thought Bowen, until he saw what lay on the bare ground at the center of the pen and realized that what he was smelling was not animal, but human.

The young man was naked and staked out in the sun. He had a short, neatly-trimmed beard, and his black hair was pasted to his skull with sweat and mud. A leather belt had been tied around his head. His teeth were visible, gritted against it, as the wounds he had suffered were widened and probed. The man stooped over him wore coveralls and gloves as he worked on the body, his fingers exploring the new cavities and apertures he had created with his blade, pausing occasionally as the staked man tensed and made soft mewling sounds from behind the gag before continuing his work. Bowen didn’t know how he had kept the kid on the ground alive, let alone conscious, but then Kittim was a man of many talents. He rose at the sound of Bowen’s approach, his body unfolding like that of a disturbed insect, and turned to face him.

Kittim was tall, six-two or six-three. The cap and glasses that he habitually wore almost obscured his features entirely, intentionally so because there was something wrong with Kittim’s skin. Bowen didn’t know precisely what it was, and he had never worked up the courage to ask, but Kittim’s face was a pinkish-purple color, with wispy clumps of hair attached to the flaking skull. He reminded Bowen of a marabou stork, built to feed on the dead and the dying. His eyes, when he chose to reveal them, were a very dark green, like a cat’s eyes. Beneath the coveralls his body was hard and slim, almost emaciated. His nails were neatly trimmed, and he was clean shaven. He smelled vaguely of meat and Polo aftershave.

And sometimes of burning oil.

Bowen looked beyond him to where the young man lay, then returned his attention to Kittim. Carlyle was right, of course: Kittim was a freak, and of Bowen’s small retinue only Landron Mobley, who was himself little better than a mad dog, appeared to feel any kind of affinity for him. It was not merely the torments being visited on the Jew that disgusted Bowen, but the sense of carnality that accompanied them. Kittim was aroused. Bowen could see it straining against the coveralls. For a moment, it caused anger to overcome Bowen’s underlying fear of the man.

“You enjoying yourself?” asked Bowen.

Kittim shrugged. “You asked me to find out what he knew.” His voice was like a broom sweeping across a dusty stone floor.

“Carlyle says he knows nothing.”

“Carlyle isn’t in charge here.”

“That’s right. I am, and I’m asking you if you’ve found out anything useful from him.”

Kittim stared at him from behind his shades, then turned his back on Bowen.

“Leave me,” he said, as he knelt to recommence his exploration of the young man. “I have not finished.”

Instead of departing, Bowen drew his gun from its holster. His thoughts were once again concentrated on this strange deformed man and the wraithlike nature of him and his past. It was as if they had conjured him up, he thought, as if he were a personification of all their hatreds and fears, an abstraction made flesh. He had come to Bowen, offering his services, and the knowledge of him had begun to seep into Bowen like gas into a room, half-remembered tales assuming a new substance around him, and Bowen had been unable to turn him away. What was it Carlyle had said? He was a legend, but why? What had he done?

And he didn’t seem interested in the cause, in the niggers and the faggots and the kikes whose very existence gave most of his kind the fuel they needed for their hatred. Instead, Kittim seemed distant from such matters, even while he was inflicting torments on a naked victim. Now Kittim was trying to tell him what to do, ordering him to leave his presence like Bowen was just some house nigger with a tray. It was about time that Bowen regained control of this situation and showed everybody who was boss. He stepped lightly around Kittim, then raised the gun and pointed it at the young man on the ground.

“No,” said Kittim softly.

Bowen looked over and-

And Kittim shimmered.

A sudden wave of intense heat seemed to pass over him, causing him to ripple behind its passage, and for an instant he was both Kittim and something else, something dark and winged, with eyes like those of a dead bird, reflecting the world without revealing any life within. His skin was loose and withered, the bones visible beneath it, the legs slightly bent, the feet elongated. The smell of oil grew stronger and, for an instant, Bowen understood. By doubting him, by allowing his own feelings of anger to break through, he had somehow permitted his mind to register an aspect of Kittim, the truth of him, that had remained hidden until now.

He’s old, thought Bowen, older than he looks, older than any of us could have imagined. He has to concentrate to hold himself together. That’s why his skin is the way it is, why he walks so slowly, why he keeps himself apart. He has to struggle to maintain this form. He’s not human. He is-

Bowen took a step back as the figure reconstituted itself, until once again he was staring at a man in coveralls with blood on his gloved hands.

“What’s wrong?” asked Kittim, and even in his confusion and fear Bowen knew better than to answer truthfully. In fact, he couldn’t have told the truth even if he wanted to because his mind was doing some pretty rapid work to shore up his threatened sanity and now he wasn’t sure what the truth was. Kittim couldn’t have shimmered. He couldn’t have changed. He couldn’t be what Bowen had thought, for an instant, he might be: a thing dark and winged, like a foul, mutated bird.

“It’s nothing,” said Bowen. He stared dumbly at the gun in his hand, then put it away.

“Then let me get back to work,” said Kittim, and the last thing Bowen saw was the fading hope in the eyes of the young man on the ground before Kittim’s thin form blocked him from view.

Bowen brushed past Carlyle on his way back to the car.

“Hey!” Carlyle reached out to grasp him, then drew back and allowed his hand to fall as he saw Bowen’s face.

“Your eyes,” he said. “What happened to your eyes?”

But Bowen didn’t reply. Later, he would tell Carlyle what he had seen, or what he thought he had seen, and in the aftermath of what was to come Carlyle would tell the investigators. But for now Bowen kept it to himself and his face registered no emotion as he drove away, not even when he stared into the rearview mirror and saw that the capillaries in his eyeballs had burst, his pupils now black holes at the center of red pools of blood.

Far to the north, Cyrus Nairn retreated back into the darkness of his cell. He was happier here than outside, mingling with the others. They didn’t understand him, couldn’t understand him. Dumb: that was the word a whole lot of people had used about Cyrus throughout his life. Dumb. Dummy. Mute. Schizo. Cyrus didn’t care too much about what they said. He knew that he was smart. He also, deep down inside, suspected that he was crazy.

Cyrus had been abandoned by his mother at nine and tormented by his stepfather until he was finally incarcerated for the first time at the age of seventeen. He could still recall some details about his mother: not love or tenderness-no, never that-but the look in her eyes as she grew to despise what she had brought into the world in the course of a difficult, complicated birth had remained with him. The boy was born hunched, unable to stand fully upright; his knees buckled as if he were laboring constantly beneath some unseen weight. His forehead was too large, overshadowing dark eyes, the irises nearly black. He had a flattened nose with elongated nostrils, and a small, rounded chin. His mouth was very full, the upper lip overhanging the lower, and it remained slightly open even in repose, making Cyrus appear always to be on the verge of biting.