Mystery Walk

look straight to his soul, and she'd scared the daylights out of him. 'Yes sir, I guess that would be best.'

'Good. And will you slip around to the side door? If you go back out through that waitin' room, there might be another commotion.'

Wayne nodded. The woman's voice echoed in his head: Do you know what you're doing, son? Something within him suddenly seemed to be tottering over a cliff's edge, and he jerked himself back with the savage thought: She's as evil as sin itself, her and the demon boy, and they should both be cast into the Lord's fire! Lord says what? BURN THEM! 'We'll get them, won't we, Dad?'

'We'll get 'em,' Falconer replied. 'Just leave it to me. Come on, I'd best get out there. Remember: out the side way, okay?'

'Yes sir.' A low flame of rage was burning inside Wayne. How dare that woman touch him like that! He wished now that he'd struck her across the face, knocked her to her knees for everyone to see. He was still shaking from being so close to them. Their darkness, he knew, was pulling at him, trying to lure him. There would be a next time, he told himself; oh yes, and then . . .

He had the vague beginnings of a headache. He said, 'I'm ready now,' and followed his father out of the utility room.

26

John was awake in the dark, thinking.

Ramona shifted softly in the crook of his arm; they'd slept closer in the last three nights, since what had happened at Fayette County Hospital, than they had in many years. His throat was still bruised from where a man's forearm had pressed against it, and he'd been hoarse the next day until he'd accepted a tea of sassafras root and dandelion that Ramona had brewed for him.

The kids who'd died in the accident had been buried the previous day. John's trips into town during the last few days had been brief; at Lee Sayre's hardware store no one would come to wait on him, and when he went to get a haircut Curtis Peel suddenly announced he'd close up for the afternoon. So he drove into Fayette for a bucket of roofing pitch, and decided to let his hair grow longer While he was in Fayette, he heard from a clerk that somebody had hidden two crates of assorted fireworks down inside the bonfire, and the intense heat had made them all go off at once. The troopers had said that the amount of black powder had been equal to a couple of short sticks of dynamite; it had looked like a kid's prank, done by somebody who'd thought the fireworks going off would take the others by surprise, but all that explosive powder in such a small space, the heat of the gasoline-fed fire, and the small, sharp shards of wood had added up to seven deaths and a score of terrible injuries. One boy, a senior football player named Gus Tompkins, was still lingering at the Burn Center Hospital in Birmingham, blinded and shocked dumb.

By the light of the anger he'd felt toward Jimmy Jed Falconer, John had seen amazing things, both true and unsettling, about his own life and beliefs. He hadn't been able to understand why Falconer had deliberately tried to hurt Ramona and Billy, tried to stir up the crowd against them like that; the man had spouted one lie after another about them, had even tried to make it out that Billy had been to blame for the accident! Thinking about these things had started rusted wheels turning in his head; there was pain, yes, but it seemed that for the first time in a very long while he was being powered from his own dynamo, not from the cast-off sparks of someone else's.

Now it seemed to him that Falconer was a man of God, but yet he was still only a man, too. And that boy of his could heal, but not all the time and not everybody. It was too simple to say that a man belonged either to God or to Satan; no, even the best of men had bad days—or bad thoughts—and every once in a while might slip off the righteous path. Did that necessarily damn you to Hell for eternity? Falconer himself had slipped off, by his lies, and so had the boy, by his actions; did that make them more human, or did it mean that Satan was at work in their lives?

And what about Ramona and Billy? What was this power they had, to lay the dead to rest? Where did it come from: God? Satan? Neither one, or a combination of both? And what if he'd been wrong, all these years, about Ramona and her mother?

He started to roll over on his side, but then he realized how quiet it was; usually the crickets in the grass were fiddling fit to bust on a warm summer night like . . .

The house was suddenly filled with a white glare. John sat up abruptly, half blinded, and heard a loud metallic clanging and crashing outside, seemingly all around the house. He grabbed his pants off a chair and struggled into them as Ramona sat up in bed. 'What is it?' she asked frantically. 'What's that sound?' He drew aside the curtains to look out the small window; bright beams of light cut into his eyes, and he couldn't see a thing out there. He said, 'Stay here!' and ran for the front door. He stepped out onto the porch, shielding his eyes from the light. White orbs ringed the house, and now he could make out human shapes, banging together pots and pans and iron pipes. The raucous rough music rang in John's head, and dull terror throbbed within him as he realized the shapes were sheeted in Klan garb. Cars had been pulled up close to the house, their headlights all switched on at the same time. 'What do you want?' John shouted, pacing from one side of the porch to the other, like a trapped animal. 'Get off my land!'

The clanging went on, in rhythmic cadence. Then the screen door opened and Billy came out on the porch, his face peeling as if from sunburn; there were still thick bandages on his hands, but the doctor had said they'd be fine after the raw places scabbed over. Ramona was behind him, wrapped in her gray robe; she was carrying a long carving knife.

'Stop it! You damned dogs, what do you want?' John thought of the old pistol he had, wrapped in oily rags in a drawer, and he started to go get it when the clanging suddenly died.

One of the hooded shapes stepped forward, silhouetted in bright light, and pointed toward John. 'Creekmore,' the man said, and John knew it was Lee Sayre's voice even muffled through the mask, 'this town's suffered enough misery from that woman and her boy! Surely you know by now they're not gonna renounce their ways! So we've come to set forth our terms. ...'

'Terms?' John said. 'Lee, what're you talkin' about?'

'No names, Creekmore! You took an oath!'

'That was when I was on the other side of that mask! What are y'all supposed to be? A vigilante squad? A hangin' party? Did you bring your tar and feathers? What right do you have runnin' your cars up on my land and raisin' hell like—'

'Every right!' Sayre bellowed.,'Because of the uniform we wear, and because we live in this town!'

'We've got the right to beat your ass too, Creekmore!' someone called out—Ralph Leighton's voice. 'You'd best watch your mouth!'

Sayre said firmly, 'We want the woman and the boy out of Hawthorne. We want 'em out tonight. John, you and your parents were all born and raised here, and you've always been a good, God-fearin' man. For years you were able to keep that woman in her place, but now that the boy's got the demon in him too the both of them are too strong for you. But we've decided you can stay here if you want to, John. It's not your fault you've been saddled with this corruption. ...'

'NO!' John shouted. 'This is our home, damn it! This is my wife and son you're talkin' about!'

'It's been decided,' Sayre said. 'We want them gone before something else happens around here.'

'We want that accursed boy out of this town!' Ralph Leighton stepped forward, jabbing a finger at Billy. 'First the crops went bad after he was born, and the land ain't been too good ever since! Then Dave Booker killed his whole family, and guess who was the Booker boy's friend? Then Link Patterson got sliced up at the sawmill, and we all know about that! Now there are fine kids lying in the ground and in the hospital, and just guess who was there to see it happen? My son got a faceful of splinters and broke his arm, but thank God he'll be all right, or I'd be carryin' a gun right now! He told me he heard that boy shout that everybody was going to die, that the boy was cursin' everybody and puttin' some kind of spell on 'em! Even J.J. Falconer himself said the boy's just like the mother! That boy spreads Death with him wherever he goes!'

'You lyin' sonofabitch!' John shouted, trembling with rage.

'Who's stirred you up?' Ramona's voice carried over the angered yelling, and she stepped forward to the edge of the porch. She stared down at the sheeted shapes. 'You're like dumb cattle, stampeded this way and that by the sound of thunder! You don't understand a thing about me or my son! Did that evangelist