"Yes, I'm coming, my darling dear," said the dazed Lasher, falling forward, and climbing up, and out over the windowsill onto the roof. "My Antha, wait, don't fall."
As he rose up to his full height again, he struggled to gain his balance. Michael climbed out on the tarred roof and sprang to his feet. The girl was gone. The night was high and full of the light of the moon. They stood three stories above the flags below. Michael swung the hammer one more time, one last fine blow that caught Lasher on the side of his head and sent him over the edge of the roof.
The body hurtled downward, no scream escaping from it, the head striking the flags with full force.
Michael at once climbed over the small railing. He jabbed the hammer into his belt, and, grabbing hold of the iron trellis with both hands, moved down it, half falling, half tumbling through the vines and the thick banana trees, and letting the stalks cushion him as he hit the earth below.
The thing lay on the garden path, a sprawling body of gangly arms and legs and flowing black hair. It was dead.
Its blue eyes stared up into the night sky, its mouth agape.
Michael went down on his knees beside it, and slammed the hammer down again and again on it, this time the hammer end, shattering and pounding the bones of the forehead, the bones of the cheeks, the bones of the jaw, again and again extricating the weapon from the blood and pulp only to strike once more.
At last there was nothing of the face left. The bones were cartilage, or something perhaps stronger. The thing was collapsed, and twisted and draining like something made from rubber or plastic. Blood seeped out of the battered casing of skin which had once been the face.
Nevertheless Michael hit it again. He brought the claw end down into the throat of the being, tearing it open. He did this again and again until the head was all but severed from the neck.
Finally he fell back against the base of the downstairs porch, sitting there, breathless, the bloody hammer in his hand. He felt the pain in his Chest again, but he felt no fear with it. He stared at the dead body; he stared at the dark garden. He stared up at the light coming down from the dark sky. The bananas lay broken and torn under and over the being. Its black hair clung tenaciously to the shapeless bloody pelt of battered nose and broken teeth and bones.
Michael climbed to his feet. The pain in his chest was now large and hot and almost unbearable. He stepped over the body and up onto the soft green grass of the lawn. He walked out into the middle of it, his eyes ranging slowly over the dark facade of the house next door, in which not a single light glimmered, the windows shrouded with yew and banana and magnolia so that nothing could be seen. His eyes moved over the dark shrubbery along the front fence, to glimpse the deserted street beyond.
Nothing stirred in the yard. Nothing stirred in the house. Nothing moved out beyond the fence. There had been no witnesses. In the deep soft silence and shadows of the Garden District, death had been done again and no one had noticed; no one would come. No one would call.
What will you do now? He was shaking all over; his hands were slippery with sweat and with blood. His ankle ached. He'd torn the ligament coming down the trellis, or when he'd fallen the last few feet to the ground. Didn't matter. He could walk, he could move. He could wipe off the hammer. He looked to the back of the dark garden, past the glow of the blue swimming pool, and through the iron gates to the rear yard. He saw the great arms of Deirdre's oak reaching upward, crowding out the pale clouds.
"Under the oak," he thought. "When I catch my breath. When I...when I..." and he went down on the grass, on his knees, and collapsed to the side.
Thirty-eight
FOR A LONG time he lay there. He didn't sleep. The pain came and went. Finally, he drew in his breath and it didn't hurt so much. He sat up, and then the pain started pounding in him, but it seemed small and contained within the chambers or the valves of his heart. He did not know which. He did not care. He rose to his feet, and walked to the flags.
The house lay in darkness, quiet, still as before. My beloved Rowan. Aaron...But he could not leave this mangled body here.
It lay as he had left it, only it seemed more flattened somehow, perhaps merely twisted. He didn't know. He reached down and gathered up the torso in his arms. The remains of the head broke loose from it, sticking to the flagstones, the last bit of flesh tearing like chicken fat.
Well, he would come back for the head. He began to carry the body, letting its feet drag on the ground, back along the flagstone path and up and around the pool and back towards the rear yard.
It was not hard for him after the killing. The body didn't weigh that much, and he took things very slowly. He did think once that the proper place to bury it was really under the crape myrtle tree in front. That was where he had first seen "the man" staring at him, smiling, when, as a boy, he had passed the fence.
But someone might see him from the street. No, the backyard was better. No one could witness the burial under Deirdre's oak. And then there were the other two bodies--Norgan and Stolov. He knew Stolov was dead. He'd known it when he saw him fall backwards. Michael had broken his neck. Norgan was dead. He'd seen that too.
Stolov was what had slowed Norgan, he figured, trying to resuscitate Stolov. Well, there was time to check on all that. Maybe it was really true what everybody said, that in the Mayfair family, you could kill people, and nobody did a thing.
The backyard was dark and damp, the banana trees already grown back from the Christmas freeze, and arching out along the high brick wall. He could scarcely see the roots of the oak for the darkness. He laid the body down and folded its arms over it. Like a big slender doll it looked, with its big feet and huge hands, all white like plastic and cold and still.
He went back to the flagstones beside the porch. He took off his sweater and then his shirt. He put back on the sweater, and then he picked up the head carefully by the hair. He was careful not to get blood on him; he had been spattered enough. He got most of the skin and shattered bone and blood up with the head, but then he had to reach for the remainder in a soft moist bloody handful. And the residue he wiped with his handkerchief and put that in his folded shirt too. A bundle. A bundle of the head.
He wished he had a jar suddenly. He could put it in the jar. But best it was buried. The house was dark and quiet. He couldn't take all night to do this. Rowan needed him. And Aaron, Aaron might even be hurt. And those other two bodies...all that to be done. People would surely come soon. They always did.
He carried the head back with him to the foot of the oak. Then he closed and locked the iron gates to the rear yard, just in case one of the cousins came wandering about.
The shovel was in the back shed. He had never used it. The gardeners here did that sort of work. And now he was going to bury this body in the pitch dark.
The ground was sodden beneath the tree from all the spring rain, and it wasn't hard for him to dig a fairly deep grave. The roots gave him trouble. He had to go out from the base farther than he intended, but finally he had made a narrow uneven hole, nothing like the rectangular graves of horror films and modern funerals. And he slipped the body down into it. And then the blood-soaked bundle of shirt which contained the head. In the moist heat of the coming summer this thing would rot in no time at all. The rain had already begun.
Blessed rain. He looked down into the dark hole. He really couldn't see anything of the body but one limp white hand. It didn't look like a person's hand. Fingers too long. Knuckles too big. More like something of wax.
He looked up into the dark branches of the trees. The rain was coming all right, but only a few drops had broken through the thick canopy above.
The garden was cold and quiet, and empty. No lights in the back guest house. Not a sound from the neighbors beyond the wall.
Once again, he looked down into the crumbling shapeless grave. The hand was smaller, thinner. It seemed to have become less substantial, fingers tumbling together and fusing so they lost their distinct shape. Hardly a hand at all.
Something else gleamed in the dark--a tiny firefly of green light.
He dropped down to his knees. He slipped forward on the uneven edge of the hole, left hand pitched out to the other side of the grave to steady himself, as with his right, he reached down and groped for that green sparkling thing.
He almost lost his balance, then felt the hard edges of the emerald.
He yanked the chain loose from the bloody, tangled cloth. Up out of the darkness it came, nestled in the palm of his muddy hand.
"Got you!" he whispered, staring at it.
It had been around the creature's neck, inside his clothes.
He held it, turning it, letting the starlight find it, the jewel of jewels. No great emotion came to him. Nothing. Only a sad, grim satisfaction that he had the Mayfair emerald, that he had snatched it from oblivion, from the covert unmarked grave of the one who had finally lost.
Lost.
His vision was blurred. But then it was so divinely dark out here, and so still. He gathered up the gold chain the way you might a rosary, and shoved it--jewel and chain--into the pocket of his pants.
He closed his eyes. Again, he almost lost his balance, almost slipped into the grave. Then the garden appeared to him, glistening and dim. The hand was no longer visible down there at all. Perhaps the tumbling clods of earth had covered it as they must soon cover all the rest.
A sound came from somewhere. A gate closing perhaps. Someone in the house?
But he must hurry, no matter how weary he was and how sluggish and quiet he felt.
Hurry.
Slowly, for a quarter of an hour or more, he shoveled the moist earth into the hole.
Now the rain was whispering around him, lighting up the shiny leaves of the camellias, and the stones of the path.
He stood over the grave, leaning on the shovel. He said aloud the other verse of Julien's poem:
Slay the flesh that is not human
Trust to weapons crude and cruel
For, dying on the verge of wisdom,