The Impaler

grew brighter, the colors and outlines of the objects around him more vivid. He felt numb—just stood in the doorway, staring at the grisly tableau for what seemed to him both an eternity and only a matter of seconds.

Then Edmund heard what sounded like a clicking, and felt his legs carrying him forward as if controlled by someone else. He stopped at Rally’s feet.

The blood was still trickling from the old man’s nose, but Edmund knew that trickle would have looked quite different a few minutes ago. He had witnessed a similar suicide in Iraq; an insurgent who, rather than be taken alive, stuck the muzzle of a .45 in his mouth and blew out the back of his skull. The blood from his nostrils had gushed like a pair of fire hoses, his body deflating like a balloon. It had been the same for Rally, Edmund could tell: the lower part of the old man’s face and neck, his chest and the right side of his coveralls all soaked with blood.

But where was that clicking coming from?

Edmund peered around the side of the chair and discovered two large cats lapping up the blood that had run down between the cushions and out from underneath the recliner. The cats didn’t even bother acknowledging him, and Edmund stood there watching them for some time.

Edmund turned back to Rally and caught something out of the corner of his eye—on the end table, under the lamp, on the opposite side of the recliner.

It was his grandfather’s old medicine bottle. He recognized it immediately—M-E-D-I-C-I-N-E the label read, yellowed and peeling up at the corners. The cap was still on, but Edmund could tell by the way the lamplight filtered through the glass that the bottle was empty. It stood atop a stack of old-fashioned, composition-style notebooks. Edmund recognized those as his grandfather’s, too.

Edmund picked up the bottle, unscrewed the cap, and sniffed.

Licorice and Pine-Sol. Absinthe?

But the other batch of that stuff, Rally said in his mind, well, let’s just say you could use it for more important reasons other than just drinking it for fun. We’d been close to getting the formula right for a long time.

The formula. E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L

And then Edmund saw it.

The name patch on Rally’s coveralls—on his left pocket, the silver stitching against the dark blue background.

The silver stitching that spelled out Gene Ralston.

G-E-N-E-R-A-L-S-T-O-N

The first seven letters. G-E-N-E-R-A-L

But how could that be? Rally was not the General!

C’est mieux d’oublier.

His mind suddenly racing, Edmund backed away from the bloody corpse, bumped into a chair, and stood staring at the patch in a daze, his breath coming in little puffs.

Gene Ralston = G-E-N-E-R-A-L? he asked himself over and over. No, that couldn’t be it! Rally was not included in the formula! Rally was not part of the equation!

Edmund dropped the notebooks and the bottle on the floor and fell back into a chair—closed his eyes and tried to focus on the image of the silver stitching in his mind.

Gene Ralston.

He could see it hovering there in the darkness, against the blue background, but still he only saw the word General—from an angle, out of the corner of his eye, as if it were sneaking up on him from behind. There were the French voices mixed in there, too. And there was something else—no, someone else. Someone terrifying.

Nergal, Edmund thought. Nergal was there, too!

E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L!

It was Nergal. There could be no doubt about that. Nergal was terrifying. So was Edmund now. And with him Edmund was the General. Together they would—but—

Edmund pressed the heels of his hands to his eyes, scrunched his forehead, and tried to remember. He thought he could feel the old gooiness creeping back in, but the image of the silver stitching would not expand, would not stretch out into Gene Ralston or anything else that he could recognize. And then all trace of the gooiness disappeared.

C’est mieux d’oublier.

Edmund opened his eyes and scooped up one of the notebooks from the floor—snatched a pen from amid the mess on the kitchen table and opened the notebook to the first page. His grandfather’s writing, symbols and words that Edmund didn’t understand. Everything appeared to be written in French, but Edmund couldn’t be sure—felt like he couldn’t be sure of anything anymore.

There had to be a message in here somewhere. Nergal was speaking to him. Edmund could feel it, could see it in his mind—

E + N-E-R-G-A-L = G-E-N-E-R-A-L!

That was the formula!

Edmund scribbled the letters G-E-N-E-R-A-L-S-T-O-N on the inside cover of the notebook—quickly took out the word NERGAL, and was left with E-S-T-O-N.

The answer came to him immediately.

“Of course!” Edmund said—his mind, his body relaxing at once into the bliss of total understanding. “Move the letter E the end, and you get the word stone.”

Edmund wrote it down next to Nergal.

NERGAL STONE, or STONE NERGAL, depending on how you wanted to look at it.

“The Nergal Stone,” Edmund said, smiling. “The stone seal depicting the sacrifice to the god Nergal. Gene Ralston equals the Nergal Stone! Just like the god who visited me all those years ago, the formula, the message pointing me toward the seal had been there all along! Right on Rally’s coveralls!”

One of the cats poked its head out from around the re-cliner—licked its chops and gazed up at Edmund quizzically.

“I understand,” Edmund said with tears of joy.

He drove back to the farmhouse and hid the medicine bottle and the notebooks under the floorboards in his mother’s old bedroom. That was the proper place for secrets, he thought.

Then he drove back to Rally’s and called the police. That was the sensible thing to do, he figured; it was best to just tell the truth about how he found Rally dead in his La-Z-Boy. Surely, if they investigated further, they would have a record of his phone call an hour earlier. Surely, if they investigated further, they would be able to establish Rally’s time of death shortly afterwards.

Edmund told the sheriff that the old man had sounded depressed when he talked to him on the phone—was babbling nonsense, he said, and what a shame he hadn’t gotten there sooner. He gave this as his official statement and then left—not before, of course, offering once again to be of whatever assistance he could. No, Edmund thought, it didn’t take a fat Adolf Hitler lookalike to tell the scene was a suicide; but telling the truth (well, almost the truth) was smart just to be on the safe side.

But why was Edmund even worried about all that? After all, he had nothing to do with Rally’s death.

Or did he?

What was it Rally had said on the phone? “I reckon it was only a matter of time.” Yes, Edmund thought, Rally had understood c’est mieux d’oublier; had obviously heard those words before and seemed almost resigned when he spoke again afterwards.

And hadn’t Rally seemed afraid of Edmund since his return from Iraq? Afraid of something that went beyond the old man’s connection to the illegal absinthe production?

Edmund thought about this on the ride home—scoured his memory banks, searching for an answer—but saw only the General there; the silver stitching of the formula, and the signs and messages that had been there from the God of War since the day he was born.

And when he arrived back at the farmhouse, Edmund concluded that perhaps Rally had sensed the change in him; sensed that the time had come, and that Nergal had returned to claim what was rightfully his.