Bethany's Sin Read online

  “I need your help,” Evan` said, keeping his gaze steady. “Tonight.”

  “How?”

  “I want you to take me to the landfill. I want you to show me where you found those teeth.”

  “Huh?” Neely narrowed his eyes over the burning cigarette. “What for?”

  “Because I’m going to be looking for someone. Paul Keating.”

  “Keating? The guy that lives across the street from you…?” His voice trailed off.

  “Lived across the street. Lived. I believe he’s dead, and I believe his body’s buried in the landfill.”

  Smoke streamed from Neely’s nostrils. He took the cigarette out of his mouth and stared across the room. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “You heard me right. Now listen to me. I believed your story about those women who attacked you on the road; I think they’ve attacked and killed a great many others. Now, I ask you to believe what I’m saying, and I ask you to help me. I can’t search across the landfill without you.”

  “I’m getting my ass out of here in the morning,” Neely said.

  “Okay. fine. Do what you want. But I have to stay here, and by God I’ve got to know the truth about this place. Just lead me out there, that’s all I ask. And help me dig.”

  “Jesus,” Neely whispered; he drew from the cigarette, exhaled smoke, crushed the butt out in an ashtray beside him. “You’re going hunting for a body?”

  “Or bodies,” Evan said. And from the corner of his eye he caught the swift sliding of a shadow, moving across the strip of light at the bottom of the door. He rose quietly to his feet, was across the room in a few strides as Neely watched him from the other chair; Evan unlocked the door, turned the knob, and opened it.

  There was no one in the stairway leading downstairs. The other doors along the corridor were closed. He wondered behind which of them the cunning old bitch was hiding. He shut the door again, locked it, stood with his ear pressed to the door for a moment. Heard silence.

  Neely had lit another cigarette. He drew on it as if the smoke would chase away the nagging fears that now were chewing steadily at his stomach. When Evan looked at him again, Neely saw that his eyes were slitted and steady.

  “Are you going to help me?” Evan asked, still standing against the door.

  The cigarette burned toward Neely’s fingers. He shivered suddenly because he’d felt that a figure with flaming blue eyes was standing just behind him, and it was slowly lifting an ax.

  Evan waited.

  Neely muttered, “I don’t know who’s crazier, you or me. What time?”

  “Two o’clock.”

  “What? Christ Almighty!”

  “I don’t want anyone to know.”

  “Okay, okay,” Neely said, and stood up from his chair. “Then you’d better let me get some sleep. Do you have a couple of shovels?”

  “A shovel and a pickax. I bought them this afternoon.”

  “Good. That should do it.”

  Evan opened the rear door and then turned back to him. “Something else. If I were you, I wouldn’t eat or drink anything Mrs. Bartlett tries to give you tonight. I’ll meet you out front at two o’clock sharp.” And then he’d turned away and was going down the back stairs.

  Neely watched him go. Not eat or drink anything Mrs. Bartlett offered? What the hell was that all about? A voice within him screamed no don’t do this! but he brushed it aside, refused to listen. It faded away. He closed the door and stood looking down at the suitcase. The man needed his help. What would one more day mean? But by God when he’d finished at that vile, stinking place he was going to fill that suitcase with his meager belongings, take his guitar and his songs, and get out of this village. Fast.

  He pulled his T-shirt over his head, rolled it up, and tossed it into the suitcase. He was hungry, but he decided not to ask Mrs. Bartlett to make him anything for dinner. Maybe that man wasn’t as crazy as he appeared to be. He touched his shoulder gingerly, the fingers running across the scabbed line of a scratch that he’d first noticed in the bathroom mirror a few days before.

  26

  * * *

  To the Landfill

  WEARING DARK CLOTHES and the thick-soled combat boots he’d found in a dust-covered trunk in the basement, Evan quietly climbed the stairs. He eased Laurie’s door open; a shaft of light fell across the child in her bed. Evan stepped in and stood looking at her. She was sleeping peacefully, her face untroubled; beside her lay the rag doll, grinning up at him as if they shared a secret.

  Evan reached out and gently touched her cheek. She stirred very slightly, and he drew his hand back. My princess, he thought. My beautiful princess. I pray to God you always sleep the sleep of the innocent. He leaned over, kissed her forehead softly, then backed away from her and closed the door to her bedroom.

  It was time to go.

  Through the den windows he could see the moon, not completely oval yet, but as white as ice and casting a clear light. A sluggish night wind was blowing large, silver-edged clouds across the sky, and when they crossed the moon’s cunning face, the light became murky, twisted with shadows that looked like figures on horses of gargantuan scale. And now Evan felt as he had so often during the war: leaving the safety of camp for a recon mission under cover of night, trusting his instincts to keep him alive, knowing that all eyes were enemy eyes and morning was ages away. Perhaps it was best, he thought now, that he’d been captured those many years ago, and forced to lie on a cot beneath the contemptuous gaze of that female officer; now he knew that he couldn’t underestimate these women of Bethany’s Sin because if he did he could expect no mercy. With them it was either kill or be killed. He took his keys, left and locked the house. McClain Terrace lay cloaked in darkness. He slid into the station wagon and started the engine, switching on the parking lights instead of the full headlights. As he backed out of the driveway, slowly, slowly, the new shovel and pickax clinked together behind him.

  As Evan drove away from the house on McClain Terrace he never saw curtains move from a window at the front of the Demargeon house. Never saw the flaming eyes that peered through.

  On the drive to the boardinghouse, following the yellow glow of the parking lights, Evan wondered what he would do if he found the bones of Paul Keating. Go to Sheriff Wysinger? To the state police? He realized there was danger in going to Wysinger; he didn’t know on which side the man stood. Was it possible these terrible events were swirling around Wysinger without his even knowing it? Perhaps, but Evan had decided he couldn’t take that chance. There was too much to lose. But how in God’s name could he ever explain to anyone what he thought to be true of Bethany’s Sin, that it was as haunted as ancient Themiscrya had been, that the deathless essence of the Amazon nation had taken root here, in this village, and one by one the women had been taken over by a fierce, nameless evil that reveled and rejoiced in the slaughter and mutilation of men? The secrets of Bethany’s Sin were layered, and dripping with black filth; a beautiful village on the outside, all-perfect, designed to lure its victims closer, and closer, and closer, until they were inescapably entangled. Those things-beyond-death, those bloodthirsty warrior-shadows had clutched leechlike to the soul of Kathryn Drago, and she had brought them out of that ancient cavern and now released them like sparks from a huge blaze to burn within other souls. The queen, Laurie had said. The real queen. Dr. Drago. Was it possible that the bones of an Amazon queen had lain in that cavern and been burned to ashes with the rest? And now that fierce lioness of a woman had claimed Kathryn Drago’s body for her own, as a fitting receptacle for a hate and power that had spanned the ages?

  Silent streets unwound before him. Mrs. Bartlett’s boardinghouse ahead. He slowed, pulled to the curb, and stopped. A figure coming across the lawn.

  Neely, beads of sweat already shining on his face, slid in and quietly closed the door. Evan accelerated, turned in a circle, and drove away from the village.

  “It’s west—” Neely began.

  “I can fin
d it,” Evan said. At the limits of the village he reached over and switched on the headlights. The road leaped up at him.

  Neely could almost grasp the tension radiating from the other man. His own heart was thundering dully within his rib cage. He fumbled at his shirt pocket. “Mind if I smoke?”

  Evan shook his head.

  Neely took a cigarette out, stared for a few seconds at the climbing match flame, then blew it out. The green lights on the dashboard dials glowed in the ovals of his glasses. “One cigarette is all it would take,” he said, mostly to himself.

  But Evan had heard. “What?”

  “One cigarette. Toss it out the window, and poof! Sun’s burned and dried out everything around here for miles. The woods are so dry they’re crackling. No rain for weeks. Yes sir. Just one cigarette.” He regarded the red-glowing tip.

  There was a fork in the road ahead.

  “Take the right one,” Neely said, and put the cigarette back in his mouth. In another moment he shifted on the seat and said, “What makes you so sure you’re going to find anything out here? And why all this damned secrecy?”

  “You didn’t say anything about this to Mrs. Bartlett, did you?” Evan twisted his head to the side to look at him.

  “No. Nothing.”

  “Good.” Evan was silent, watching the road. A deer burst out of the brush ahead, leaped into thicket, and was gone. “I’m not certain I’ll find what I’m looking for in the landfill. As a matter of fact, I’m hoping I don’t. I’m hoping I’m stark raving mad; I’m hoping that I’m so crazy I’m not seeing or thinking straight.” He paused. “But that’s not how it is.”

  “You’re not making any sense.”

  “This has to do with those women you saw on the King’s Bridge Road,” Evan told him. “I believe they broke into Paul Keating’s house and killed him. And I believe they brought his body to the landfill. As for the secrecy”—his eyes flickered over toward Neely—“we don’t want to end up like Keating, now, do we?”

  “Turn to the left here,” Neely said quietly. He had begun to smell the sweet-and-sour-and-a-thousand-vile-odors smell of the landfill, and he dreaded what was to come. Digging through that mess? Actually lifting out layer after layer? Jesus Christ what have I gotten myself into!

  Tendrils of smoke lay across the road, shifting like gray-scaled serpents. “Slow down,” Neely said, his nostrils full of the putrid stench of baking garbage. “We’re here.”

  Evan put his foot to the brake and pulled the station wagon off onto the side of the road. He cut the engine, switched off the lights. To the right he could see a flat, unbroken blackness and, in the distance, the red gleaming of minute fires. They got out of the car, went around to the back; Evan hefted the shovel, handed Neely the pickax and a bull’s-eye lantern he’d bought at Western Auto. “Now show me,” he said.

  “Okay. Watch your step.” Neely clicked on the lantern, shouldered the moon-gleaming pickax, and made his way carefully across the black plain. Evan followed in his footprints, his boots cracking earth and awakening thick swirls of dust. Acrid smoke wafted around them, clutching at their hair and clothes like something alive; garbage mounds took vague shapes; rats squealed on all sides. The stench assailed Evan; he ground his teeth and forced back a wave of nausea, thinking only of what he had to do. Great cracks had split the earth, and by the moon’s light Evan could see in those cracks a steaming morass of garbage, layer after layer of it, shifting by degrees as the sun had mercilessly burned, burned, burned. Now it seemed to him that even the moon was brutal, searing his face with a cold fire that made his nerves shriek. Ahead, Neely moved the lantern’s beam back and forth across the ground, his shoes crunching dead earth in a no-man’s-land; the heat had fallen upon them, cloaking them, and sweat beaded their flesh.

  And like whirling, buzzing clouds of darker dust, the flies came. A dozen of them struck Neely in the face, tangled in his hair, spun around his head. “Christ!” he said in disgust, and waved at the things with his lantern. They parted, buzzed, came at him again. Flies attached themselves to the drops of sweat on Evan’s face and arms, drinking greedily of human fluids.

  “Wait a minute,” Neely said; he stopped, waved at flies, waved again. His eyes followed the track of the lantern on the ground. A huge mound of decaying garbage stood just to the left, topped with bald tires and automobile fenders. A battered, rusted refrigerator lay on its side like an open coffin. Neely moved forward a few yards, looking around to get his bearings; he shone the beam from side to side, searching for that wide crack in which he’d found the teeth. But Christ in heaven the earth was jigsawed with cracks out here, but there was no way to be sure where it had been. I should be packing my suitcase right now, he told himself, not out here in this miserable place. God, the stench of it! And these fucking flies!

  “What’s wrong?” Evan said behind him.

  Neely walked a few steps to where the dry ground had split; glass gleamed in the crack: beer bottles. Why not let this guy do his digging right here, he thought. Get this over with so I can get my ass out of this place? “This is it,” he said without looking at the other man.

  “You’re certain?”

  “Yes, I’m certain!” he said, placing the lantern on the upturned side of the refrigerator so the beam would shine down into the split. Might as well get this over with! He waved flies away that had been dancing before his eyes. “Stand back,” he told Evan, and, bracing himself, he lifted the pickax, brought it down into the earth with a smooth, strong swing. Glass cracked; Evan heard the noise of metal scraping metal. Neely pulled the pickax out and struck again, and again, and again. Then he wiped a drop of sweat from the point of his chin and stepped away. “It’s all yours.”

  Evan dug in with the shovel, uncovering bits of glass, empty tin cans, flattened milk cartons, fragments of magazines and newspapers. He dug deeper, putting his shoulders against the shovel; uncovered more glass, cans, Bethany’s Sin trash.

  “What’s that?” Neely said suddenly.

  Evan thought the man was talking about a clump of rusted steel wool. He turned and said, “Nothing. Just junk.”

  But Neely wasn’t staring into the deepening hole; instead he was staring off to the right, into the darkness. “No,” Neely said quietly. “I heard something.” The moon glistened across his glasses. “A long way off.”

  “What did it sound like?” Evan rested on his shovel.

  “I don’t know. Like a whine or something.”

  A train whistle? Evan thought. He glanced off in the direction the other man was looking, then turned back to the hole. Thrust in with the shovel again. Met harder earth. “Need the pickax again.”

  Neely swung into the hole, broke earth; a boil of dust engulfed them, then the flies. Death’s here, Evan thought, his blood chilling. Death’s here somewhere. He stepped forward after Neely was through and began to dig again. In a few minutes more, he uncovered what at first appeared to be a whole shirt, but holding it up he realized it had been torn into rags for some household chore; he threw it aside, shoveled dirt.

  The moon’s light lay heavily on Neely’s face; he stared into the distance, listening. What had that noise reminded him of? he wondered. Yes. Something he’d heard before.

  “Pickax,” Evan said.

  When he’d finished, Neely said, “This is pretty pointless, don’t you think? I mean, if you’re looking for bones, there’s a hell of a lot of territory to cover.”

  Evan said nothing; he thrust downward, lifted dirt and held it up to the light, cast it aside. Thrust, lifted. Thrust, lifted. Flies gathered around his sweating face, and he shook his head to get rid of them. Death. Death. Death somewhere. And then, abruptly, he froze. He’d heard a high, screeching noise in the distance; he looked up, scanned the dark, forest-studded horizon.

  “You heard that, didn’t you?” Neely said. “What the hell was it?” His eyes were wide and shining behind his glasses.

  “Some kind of animal off in the woods,” Evan replied even
ly. His gaze shifted, searched, saw nothing but moonlight and garbage mounds and shadow. “Pickax.”

  “Animal, my ass!” Neely said sharply. “That didn’t sound like any damned animal I’ve ever heard before!”

  “I need some more earth broken,” Evan told him, stepping up out of the deepening trench.

  Neely, muttering, stepped down. The pickax rose, fell, rose, fell, rose, fell. In the distance something screeched. Pickax flashed with moonlight. “There’s nothing here, by God!” Neely said. “Christ, I don’t know if this is the right place or not! How can I tell?” He pulled himself out from a morass of dirt and trash.

  Evan, his shirt soaked, sifted dirt. Coke bottles, crushed beer cans, Tide detergent boxes, clumps of tissue paper, Lysol cans. A strengthening, sickening stench. The flies swarmed, waiting.

  Screeeeeech. Nearer. Off from the left now. An eerie whine that made Neely’s stomach tighten.

  Evan dug in, lifted. A dark, solid object came free from the dirt. He bent and picked it up, held it to the light. A dirt-and-filth-clumped loafer, creased from wear. While he held it, flies dropped down to examine it, then whirled away. He tossed it out of the trench, now hip-deep, and continued digging.

  “You’re not going to find anything,” Neely said, his voice tense. “Let’s get out of here!”

  “In a minute,” Evan said. Digging. Digging. Digging. The sides of the trench were beginning to crumble. Dirt rolled around his boots. The flies hovered above him, all of them heralds of Death and scavengers of flesh. His shoulders were aching fiercely, and he hardly heard the next half-human shriek when it came from the right, closer than any of the others had been.

  Neely whirled toward the sound, his heart pounding. He’d heard that noise before, on the King’s Bridge Road, when a woman with scorching blue eyes had peered at him through the window of his truck an instant before an ax had flashed. The heat had surrounded him, and now he found it difficult to breathe.