“Stop,” Orvid commanded.
I kept walking.
“Fever, wait,” he said, his voice softening.
I slowed.
“I don't have any desire to do you harm,” Orvid began. “How about if we keep looking for Frazier, and I hold off on my mission at least until we see him and you have a chance to talk him into coming with us to face the sheriff?”
I turned.
Orvid replaced his blade, and he was once again holding a stylish walking cane.
“I wouldn't have expected you to be this reasonable,” I said suspiciously, “after that look in your eye a moment ago.”
“And I didn't think you'd object so strongly to my plan. I had no idea. I thought you'd endorse it. It's simple and direct and solves everyone's problems.”
“It's morally reprehensible.”
“According to whose plan?” Orvid said, resting on his cane.
I was certain that he had not given up on his plan to kill Frazier. He was clearly humoring me. But at least he'd put away his blade. What I didn't tell Orvid was how difficult it had been for me to argue against the murder, a confession I was barely able to make to myself. A part of me would be happy to see Hiram Frazier die.
I looked around, burying such thoughts. Instead I let my eyes run over the geography of the ruined mill. It offered almost no place to hide. All the walls were crumbled.
“Well,” I said to Orvid, managing a wan smile, “we've done everything we can to warn Frazier, if he's here.”
“Yelling and threatening to kill him,” he agreed, “yes, you're probably right.”
“If he was here at all,” I said, softer.
“We should still have a look around.” Orvid surveyed the place.
“I think it might be worth a quick look in the back. There were most likely train tracks close by at one time, usually the case with a mill this size. We could see if the tracks were there.”
“Are you sure they're still operable?” Orvid said, a spark of excitement in his voice.
“Absolutely,” I said, moving toward the back of the building. “That would be the way freights get to Chattanooga.”
“Indeed.” He nodded. “Then let's go have a look.”
We moved through the rubble and weeds to the back of the mill through wide-open expanses in what was left of the building. No one could have been hiding there.
Not fifty feet from the back of the building I could see railroad tracks.
“There.” I pointed.
“I see them,” Orvid said, moving faster.
The tracks seemed recently worn. The top of the rail was steel gray, not a trace of rust red.
“Which way is town?” Orvid said, trying to get his bearings.
“South, and a little east.” I inclined my head slightly. “That way.”
The tracks ran straight toward the town in that direction, probably right to the tourist center. The opposite way, down the mostly westward run, they disappeared into a thick cover of evergreens.
“I think I'm just going to see where the tracks go,” Orvid said, peering into the evergreens. “It looks like they might bend a little more northward up there, and there's a clearing, can you see?”
I strained.
“No,” I reported, “but we know your eyes are better than mine in the dark.”
“Well, if they do bend, it would be a lot like the turn in the tracks at Pine City, a place where the train has to slow down.”
“A perfect place to hop on.”
“I'm checking it out.” Orvid started down the tracks. “Are you coming?”
“Wait,” I told him. “I've got a flashlight in my truck. It looks kind of dark in the woody part.”
“Good. Go get it, then catch up. I'll follow straight down the tracks.”
He took off and I turned back the other way, loping toward my truck. A minute later I rummaged under the driver's seat and came out with my trusty flashlight.
I snapped it on; the beam shattered shadows in the mill. I dashed through the mill once again, toward the woods where Orvid had gone.
I was almost to the the back of the building, my light glancing off the steel beams of the tracks, when I heard a deep voice directly behind me whisper a curse.
I spun around.
Hiram Frazier stood framed by brick and moonlight, a rusted iron bar in his right hand. His black suit was soaked, and his shoes frayed at the soles. Hair was wild about his head, face a mask of gnarled pain. The eyes were red blisters, burning holes in the air around the face
My flashlight was blinding him.
“Put down that damned torch!” He raised his iron bar and took a step toward me.
I stumbled back, clicking off the flashlight.
“You waiting for the train?” Frazier said, his voice like a hollow stone tunnel.
I started to speak before I realized he didn't know who I was.
“Yes,” I said, my voice low. “It slows down around the bend in the woods.”
“I know that,” he snapped. “I been ride these rails for a hundred years, you don't think I know that?”
His words were slurred, and he swayed unsteadily. He was full of liquor, full to the brim. The smell of it poured out his mouth, oozed from his skin, his scars. Rage and bone were all that kept him standing. It was clear that he might explode at any moment.
I took another step back from him, deciding on something of a risky course of action.
“Are you Hiram Frazier?”
“What?” he roused, trying to focus his eyes. “That's my name.” He peered all around me, trying to see me in the dark through a drunken fog.
“Everyone knows the preacher from Pistol Creek,” I continued, my voice steady.
“Stop!” He dropped the iron bar and put his hands to his ears. “No one knows who I am. No one knows what I am.”
“You're Hiram Frazier, wandering preacher,” I said, stronger, “and the Lord's whipping boy.”
“Oh,” he moaned low. “I am.”
“You have a trick. You know how to get money whenever you want it. You stick close to the rail crossings and red lights and you reach into the cars and take their keys.”
“What are you?” he whispered, looking down at the ground.
I took a deep breath. My heart was pounding.
“You were at a train crossing a few nights ago. You stood there in the rain until an orange Volkswagen came by. A pumpkin car.”
“Pumpkin car,” he repeated softly.
“Two young girls were in the car, and you took their keys.”
“I did?” he asked helplessly. “It sounds like me.”
“Only there was a train coming.”
“The Lord's recompense,” Frazier rattled hypnotically, “come to repay every one for what he has done.”
“No,” I hedged, careful not to break the spell he was under, “it was a train, a train coming around the bend. You didn't give the keys back, and the girls didn't have time to get out of the car. They were killed.”
“I don't remember,” he howled.
“It was just two nights ago,” I coaxed.
“I had a church in Pistol Creek, Tennessee,” he mumbled, “many years back. Good congregation: sober, plain, and mean. But the Lord took me as his testing scourge. I awoke one morning to find my wife, my jewel, she was stone-cold dead in the bed beside me. No warning, no word of farewell. We all come to death, one way or another. Some
come to it slow. This is my punishment: to be a traveling creature, a beacon to woman and man. If you would shun the burning hell, you'd take a warning by me.”
“And two nights ago you tried to get two girls to give you money,” I prompted.
“Two virgins in a pumpkin carriage,” he said, his voice growing louder. “Laughing. God smote them. For no good reason. Just took them, sent them a black snake belching smoke which roared over them like an iron thunder. They were gone before the noise of it left the air. Gone.”
He held his hands wide, a poisoned imitation of the crucifixion.
“When God wants to purge this earth,” Frazier went on, gaining strength, “he sends a dark angel. No creature of light can help this pustule globe. There is no salvation, there is only cleansing. Those who are pure are washed clean, those who are weak are washed away. There are Two Rivers in God's wilderness, the one that rides a body to sweet fields arrayed in living green and pastures of delight, the other that turns molten and purges skin from bone, in a place no human tongue can tell.”
He thumped his chest hard, it made a hollow drumming sound.
“God chose me!” he shouted. “I am a soldier in the army of darkness, God's purging river. But it's hard. It's hard to do.”
“Why?” I asked, hoping to steer his thinking back to Tess and Rory.
“Because God's Ways are impossible to comprehend.” Frazier heaved a sigh, a lifetime of desperation in a single breath. “He's taken my mind. It's gone. My mind is dead. But this body keeps doing things, things I can't even recall on the morrow of the next day.”
“What things?”
“I drink,” he confessed, suddenly weeping, his entire demeanor collapsed into begging for pity. “No other way to bear the pain. The demon of alcohol chases all other demons away. I concentrate all my efforts on that one demon, and God keeps the rest at bay.”
“The demon of memory.”
“Gone,” he said with a flourish of his wrist.
“Guilt.”
“Swallowed up,” he said, his voice shifting again. “I know you?” His eyes were clearing a little. His head stilled and his breathing steadied.
“We've met. You told me before that you saw the accident the other night at the rail crossing in Pine City.”
“Pine City,” he said, closing his eyes, “is the one with the nice rhododendrons.”
That was the moment I was convinced something of the human was still left inside the blasted body of Hiram Frazier.
“Yes,” I sighed.
“Two girls,” he mumbled, eyes still closed. “The one driving was laughing, fishing around in her purse, looking for money for me. The other was laughing too, with little earmuffs on. Nobody heard the train.”
“You remember now.” The
earmuffs
were Rory's headphones.
“I do,” he answered, his voice quavering.
His eyes flashed open.
“Why you to make me recall that?” he growled. “What
are
you?”
“You remember taking their keys?” I demanded.
He blinked hard, squeezing his eyes shut for a long moment. In the meantime his hand rummaged in a torn coat pocket.
Seconds later he produced a set of three keys. They were held together by a key ring with a silver
VW
on it.
“You didn't mean for it to happen,” I said softly. “You didn't mean for them to be hit by the train.”
“It was not my doing,” he said, still holding out the keys. “God brought the train.”
“But you took the keys,” I insisted.
“God brought the train,” he said, slipping back into incoherence.
“You have to go with me,” I told him firmly. “You have to come back to Pine City.”
“What?” His eyes had gone blurry again, and he searched around my head, trying to pinpoint my face. “Go where?”
I took a quick step in his direction. The confidence I'd gained
from my recent meeting with Eppie, not to mention the age differential between Frazier and me, made me bold.
“I have to take you with me,” I said sternly, “back to Pine City where it happened, to the sheriff. You'll explain what you did, it was an accident.”
“No,” he whined, “I'm going home to Pistol Creek.”
“Not tonight,” I insisted, reaching for his arm.
He staggered sideways, about to topple.
“Why'd I have to go with you?” His words were so run together they were barely comprehensible.
“Because you were responsible for the deaths of two people!” I told him, my voice booming.
“God brought a train!” he shouted back, spitting.
Without warning, Frazier swung his arm like an opening door and it connected with my shoulder.
I staggered sideways, stunned; instantly pumped with adrenaline.
Frazier reached down and grabbed the iron bar he'd dropped, cocked it back like a baseball bat, and took a swing at my head.
I blew out a breath and snapped my head back. The bar only missed me by inches. I looked around for anything to use against him, moving away from Frazier and pumping my lungs.
He was growling, a low sound that leaked from his head. His face was lowered and his dead eyes glared at me from the tops of their sockets. A weak strand of drool soiled his lower lip, and I could see how many of his teeth were missing. There was nothing in that body but the desecrated passion for preservation, an insect compulsion.
I took a few more steps backward and planted myself, readying for an attack.
He stood staring.
“Hiram,” I began, hoping to rouse the human being inside the husk.
“God!” he exploded. “How do you know my name?”
He swung the iron bar back and forth in front of him like a scythe, coming at me. He was moving faster than I would have imagined he could.
Without thinking, I did what I'd seen my friend Andrews do a dozen times in rugby matches: I dove toward Frazier's legs; toppled him like a bowling pin.
He went down hard, pounding the ground with an organ-churning thud.
“Hellfire!” he howled.
I leapt to my feet, panic breath forcing strangled sounds from my throat. I pulled a solid brick from the crumbling wall beside me, the only weapon I could think of.
Frazier was on his feet, unsteady but filled with a power past exhaustion. He started toward me again and I threw the brick with all my strength, underhanded, hoping to catch his chin. Instead the brick hit the arm holding the rod and he dropped it once more.
Without skipping a beat he ignored his fallen weapon; charged me.
I sidestepped easily, but I could feel a slow terror growing in the pit of my stomach. I had no idea how to stop this man, and he would never stop himself.
Frazier stumbled past me, but he swung his hand backward, grabbing my leg. I fell onto my back, instantly kicking and flailing my arms, hoping to fend him off that way.
But Frazier was on top of me instantly, his thumbs pressed into my Adam's apple, his palms tight on my jugular. Within seconds I could feel myself blacking out.
Eyes wide, I pounded both sides of his head over and over, battering his ears, his temples, to no avail. My fists were wind.
In absolute desperation I shot my thumbs into his eyes, ground them into his sockets. I imagined his eyeballs bursting like grapes.
They did not.
But Frazier roared and pulled back long enough for me to kick my way out from under him. I skittered backward, crab walking, until I was several feet away from where he lay on his side, cursing, words I could not understand, hands over his eyes.
I scoured the dark weeds around me and found the iron bar.
I hefted it and had every intention of bashing Frazier's skull. I
moved slowly his way, the bar in both hands, slightly over my right shoulder.
He heard me coming, lowered his hands. Through his red, dimmed eyes he could see me and began to moan.
“Stop. Stop!” His voice rose like a train whistle in the distance.
I was still light-headed; the red imprint of his vise grip still lingered in burning on my neck.
“I'll go,” he whimpered. “Take me where you want. I'll go along quiet.”
He rocked a little, back and forth in the wet grass and muddy ground. I raised the iron bar above my head, already seeing his skull cave in.
“What are you doing?” he whimpered.
I froze. What
was
I doing?
I dropped the iron instantly, my senses flooding back. A sudden realization that I had been about to kill a man shocked my body, and I began to tremble. The adrenaline and sweat mixed with November chill, and I was freezing to the bone, unable to stop shivering.
“Where do I have to go?” Frazier said weakly, dead still.
“Pine,” was all I could manage before sucking in painful breath.
“Okay, then,” he said, rolling slowly to a sitting posture.
He put his hands out beside him and tried three times to stand while I stared at him. He rocked in my direction, but could not get up, and I could not help him.
Slowly I became aware of tree frogs and night birds, bats and crickets, grinding pieces of the night sky into black sounds. The moon broke free of its cloud-gray prison long enough to spill milky light on the bricks around me, the dead grass, here and there a sedate spray of wild ageratum, mauve in the moonlight.