The White Road

“Do you recognize him?” he asked Earl Jr.

Earl Jr. shook his head. Kittim seemed dissatisfied with the answer, with the fact that he did not have the information he required to make an accurate assessment of the situation.

“Who are you?” he asked.

“My name is Tereus.”

“Did you kill Maria

“No, I did not. I killed the others, and I watched Foster attach a hose to the exhaust pipe of his car and feed it in through his window. But I didn’t kill the Larousse girl.”

“Then who did?”

She was nearby. I knew she was. I could feel her. It seemed to me that Larousse did too, because I watched his head flick back suddenly like a startled deer, his eyes roving across the trees, looking for the source of his unease.

“I asked you a question,” Kittim persisted. “Who killed her?”

Three armed men emerged from the trees at either side of us. Instantly Tereus dropped his gun to the ground and I knew that he had never pla

Two of the men beside us I did not recognize.

The third was Elliot Norton.

“You don’t seem surprised to see me, Charlie,” he said.

“It takes a lot to surprise me, Elliot.”

“Even the return of an old friend from the dead?”

“I have a feeling you’ll be making a more permanent return in the near future.” I was too tired even to show my anger. “The blood in the car was a nice touch. How were you going to explain your resurrection? A miracle?”

“We were under threat from some crazy Negro, so I did what I had to do to hide myself. What are they going to charge me with? Wasting police time? False suicide?”

“You killed, Elliot. You led people to their deaths. You bailed Atys just so your friends could torture him and find out what he knew.”

He shrugged. “Your fault, Charlie. If you’d been better at your job and got him to tell all, he might still be alive.”

I winced. He’d struck close to the bone, but I wasn’t going to bear the responsibility for Atys Jones’s death alone.

“And the Singletons. What did you do, Elliot? Sit with them in the kitchen drinking their lemonade, waiting for your friends to come and kill them while the only person who could have protected them was in the shower? The old man said it was a changeling that attacked them, and the police thought that he was talking about Atys until he turned up tortured to death, but it was you. You were the changeling. Look at what they’ve reduced you to, Elliot, what you’ve reduced yourself to. Look at what you’ve become.”

Elliot shrugged. “I had no choice. Mobley told Bowen everything, once when he was drunk. Landron never admitted it, but it was him. So Bowen had something on all of us and he used it to make me bring you down here. But by then all of this”-he made an all-encompassing gesture with his free hand, taking in the hole, the swamp, dead men, and the memory of raped girls-“had started happening, so we used you. You’re good, Charlie, I’ll give you that. In a way, you’ve brought us all to this point. You should go to your grave a satisfied man.”

“Enough.” It was Kittim. “Make the Negro tell us what he knows and we can finish this for good.”

Elliot raised his gun, pointing it first at Tereus, then at me.

“You shouldn’t have come to the swamp alone, Charlie.”

I smiled at him.

“I didn’t.”

The bullet hit him on the bridge of the nose and knocked his head back so hard I could hear the vertebrae in his neck crack. The men at either side of him barely had a chance to react before they too fell. Larousse stood confused and then Kittim was raising his weapon and I felt Tereus push me to the ground. There were shots, and warm blood splashed my face. I looked up to catch the look of surprise in Tereus’s eyes before he tumbled into the pit and landed with a splash in the water far below.

I picked up his fallen revolver and ran for the woods, expecting to feel one of Kittim’s shots tear into me at any moment, but he was already fleeing. I caught a glimpse of Larousse disappearing into the trees, and then he also disappeared from sight.

But only for a moment.

He reemerged seconds later, backing slowly away from something in the trees. I saw her moving toward him, draped in the light material, the only cloth that she could wear without paining her ruined body. Her head was uncovered. The skull was hairless, the features beneath it melting into one another, a blur of disfigurement and remembered beauty. Only her eyes appeared intact, glittering beneath her swollen eyelids. She extended a hand to Larousse and there was almost a tenderness to the gesture, like a rejected lover reaching out one last time to the man who had turned his back upon her. Larousse released a small cry then struck out at her arm, breaking the skin. Instinctively, he rubbed his hand with disgust against his jacket, then moved quickly to his right in an effort to get by her and make for the safety of the forest.

Louis stepped from the shadows and pointed his gun at Larousse’s face.

“Now where you goin’?” he asked.

He stopped, caught between the woman and the gun.

Then she sprang at him, the force of her propelling them both backward, and she wrapped herself around him as they fell, he screaming, she silent, into the black water below. For a moment, I thought I saw a whiteness spread upon the surface, and then they were gone.

26

W E WALKED BACK to Louis’s car, but could find no trace of Kittim along the way.

“You understand now?” asked Louis. “You understand why we can’t let them go, can’t let none of them go?”

I nodded.

“The bail hearing is in three day’s time,” he said. “The preacher’s go

“I’m in,” I said.

“You sure?”

I barely paused.

“I’m sure. What about Kittim?”

“What about him?”

“He got away.”

Louis almost smiled.

“Did he?”

Kittim drove at speed into the Blue Ridge, arriving at his destination in the early hours. There would be other chances for him, other opportunities. For the present, it was time to rest up and wait for the preacher to be brought to safety. After that, there would be a new momentum achieved.

He pulled into the clearing before the cabin, then walked to the door and unlocked it. The moonlight streamed through the windows, illuminating the cheap furniture, the unadorned walls. It shone too on the man who sat facing the door, and on the silenced pistol in his hand. He wore sneakers and faded jeans, and a loud silk shirt that he’d bought at final markdown in Filene’s Basement. His face was unshaven and very pale. He didn’t even blink as the shot hit Kittim in the belly. Kittim fell and tried to wrench his gun from his belt, but the man was already upon him. His gun dug into Kittim’s right temple as Kittim eased his hand away from his belt and his weapon was taken from him.

“Who are you?” he shouted. “Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m an angel,” said the man. “What the fuck are you?”

Now there were other figures around him. Kittim’s hands were pulled behind his back and cuffed before he was turned onto his back to face his captors: the small man in the mismatched shirt, two younger men armed with pistols who came in from the yard, and an older man who emerged from the shadows at the back of Kittim’s cabin.

“Kittim,” said Epstein, as he examined the man on the ground. “An unusual name, a scholarly name.”

Kittim did not move. There was a watchfulness about him now, despite the agony of his wound. He kept his eyes fixed on the older man.

“I recall that the Kittim were the tribe destined to lead the final assault against the sons of light, the earthly agents of the powers of darkness,” continued Epstein. He leaned forward, so close that he could smell the breath of the injured man. “You should have read your scrolls more closely, my friend: they tell us that the dominion of the Kittim is short-lived, and for the sons of darkness there shall be no escape.”