Maureen stumbled and broke a rickety old stall when she fell against it, sending her back to a sitting position. “O'dear- o'dear-o'dear!” Nancy's flashlight beam now bathed Maureen's features, and Nancy gasped on seeing the lesions on Maureen's face clearly now. Nancy was momentarily silenced, and she stood over Maureen frozen, her hands hesitating now to touch the other woman. The flash had caught the extent of the blue green tint to much of Maureen's skin. “What has that madman done to you?”
“ Slow poisoning… with decay of his… dead son. I… I sent his son to the electric chair.”
“ And that old bastard is wreaking as cruel a vengeance on you as he can imagine.”
“ Something out of his Bible. He's completely insane, and he will kill you, too, if he finds you here.”
“ Don't worry about me. I'm Chicago bred. I can take care of myself.”
“ Chicago? Are we near Chicago?”
“ Heavens no!”
“ Shhh… Turn off that light.”
Nancy did as ordered.
“ I think I heard something. He may be moving around.” Maureen froze, petrified of his getting his hands on her again and trussing her up to Jimmy Lee. In the darkness, she thought she saw a glint in the dead man's eye and a rictus smile shone like an Elvis sneer. “Give me the knife,” she whispered to Nancy.
“ What for?”
“ I'll kill myself before I'll let him tie me back to his son.
Nancy took a deep breath and handed the closed knife to Maureen, who latched onto it as if it were a religious icon, clutching it to her breasts.
From his bed at the farmstead-the bed he had decided to die in-Isaiah Purdy wandered again in a meander of memory, searching for his lost identity: the lost self, the lost man who had been taken over by his dead son and God. One small comer of his mind held a doubt about God in particular. Jimmy Lee was Jimmy Lee, but this here God he traveled with… Isaiah began to wonder about. Maybe this so-called God was something Jimmy Lee had conjured up, and maybe it had to do with the black arts, and maybe it was one of Satan's minions posing as God. But how to tell, how to ferret it all out, what was he to do? Either way, justice was justice, and Jimmy Lee had some modicum of justice coming.
Isaiah snapped out of the ugly thought. Where is my head at? he silently queried. Lately, he'd been asking himself this question a lot. He had no idea of the answer, not when he could question whether or not he'd been in the presence of God or not, in the presence of Satan or not. Perhaps it'd been neither. Perhaps it'd been an angel. An angel, yes. That would put things into a clearer perspective, be a lot easier to deal with. Without this sure knowledge, how could he have wreaked the vengeance he had helped Jimmy Lee to find?
He searched for the man who he had been before Jimmy Lee had gotten hold of his head. Instead, he found only an empty space staring back, a shapeless thing in coveralls, faceless and without distinct form.
He rolled over in bed. The old box springs screamed in reaction, further disturbing his sleep. A birdlike thought flew through his brain, in and out, that perhaps he ought to end it all tonight, put the bedeviled woman in the bam out of her misery. His former self would have done as much for any ailing animal on the farm. A part of him wanted to leap from the bed and just go do it, the way he might destroy a dog with incurable mange. How much more suffering could he handle? It wasn't easy being Jimmy Lee's eyes and ears.
He questioned who he was… why he was even here on this planet if not to end his life this way, to fulfill a dying son's wish: Jimmy Lee's mother had said neither yes nor no to the idea before she passed, but his son's voice in his head told him that Mother wanted what he wanted. It'd been left on Isaiah's shoulders to make the decision, as with all major decisions involving the family-at least in this life.
“ We're dealing with no less than a miracle,” Eunice had managed to mutter when he'd asked her point-blank what she thought they ought to do about Jimmy Lee's request.
After she succumbed to death, Jimmy Lee would not be denied, and he'd given Isaiah strict orders, and very specific details, down to where he could find the judge, but Jimmy Lee had been wrong about that much. When he'd left Huntsville prison in search of Judge DeCampe, he had first looked into a rental property where he could kill the judge right handy there, instead of worrying himself with carting her across the country and back home. As much as he wanted to bury Jimmy Lee at the Iowa farmstead, that was no longer feasible. Meantime, Isaiah had learned the hard way that the judge no longer resided in Houston, Texas. He'd had to investigate where she had gone, and when he found out, he almost quit the entire lunatic plan, but again Jimmy Lee- even more so in death than before- insisted the old man would not live one moment in peace if he did not carry through. Although she had not put it in words, Isaiah had to believe that Eunice had been entirely and wholly for her son's plan.
Jimmy's voice inside Isaiah's head said over and over, “You've got to do just as Mother wanted.” Jimmy Lee never let it rest. Repeatedly, the words flowed like a river through his father's brain.
On the trip back from Houston, Jimmy Lee startled the hell out of his father when he spoke from within the casket, from within the mortal remains, the electrocuted corpse. “Ice, ice, damn you, old man!” Jimmy Lee ordered up, and his voice almost made Isaiah run through a fence, so startled was he to hear his dead son's voice from outside his head and from behind him. “Keep my body fresh until you can locate Maureen.” He always called the judge by her first name.
Jimmy Lee had always wanted to be in charge, and now he was. Mother had simply wanted her boy's remains returned to the farmstead to be buried alongside her, but of course, Jimmy had to complicate matters. He couldn't just go off into whatever eternity awaited him. No, he had to drag this judge lady there with him. It didn't look promising that Mother would ever lie alongside her boy in the grave, at least not without a third party involved. Jimmy Lee wanted far, far more than did Mother. And he had asked far, far more of his papa than anyone had a right to, but somehow, the boy knew that Isaiah would do his utmost to grant him a dying wish.
An alien noise penetrated through the fog of the old man's disturbed sleep. He sensed more than he heard it: some disturbance, a faint noise like the crack of a whip but muffled. At the same instant, he realized that anything large enough to make such a noise as to wake him from this distance-the noise coming from the direction of the bam- that it must be the result of a two-legged beast.
He pushed himself from bed, and in his flannel nightshirt, he crept across the floor. He next grabbed his shotgun but thought better of making such a noise here in the middle of the night. He instead grabbed his pitchfork and the unlit lantern. Not bothering to dress, Isaiah made his way to the bam down a worn path. He saw a moving light through the cracks inside.
Definitely, someone had paid Jimmy Lee and the judge a visit, but who?
Isaiah inched toward the door, kicking an errant bucket and frightening a cat as he did so; he then quietly cursed his clumsiness. Now he had alerted whoever it was to his presence. Inside, all remained silent and dark, the light having been doused. Befuddled and only half awake, the old man wondered if the light might not be Jimmy Lee's doing. The boy had a nasty play fullness for making mischief, something he seemed born with.
What he felt deep inside he had long held in check, and the voice of his son in his head made him put one step ahead of the other to move forward. Jimmy Lee continued to drive him, and now Jimmy, as dead as the boy was, had awakened him, telling him he was needed here, inside, to witness every moment of the judge's suffering. Isaiah thought of how damnably little sleep he'd had since tying the judge to Jimmy Lee. But the next sound he heard was by no means Jimmy Lee's voice in his head. He heard a woman's whisper. Tlie judge? Impossible. Some third party had indeed entered, and Isaiah wondered how long the intruder had been inside the bam with Jimmy Lee and the judge.
He carefully set aside the lantern, lifted the pitchfork's three deadly prongs to eye level, and he inched toward the door, prepared for battle.
Jessica Coran didn't know where she was; her only certainty proved a blue veil through which everything was filtered. She saw a pastoral setting, absolutely peaceful, and serenity poured forth with the waterfall in the distance. Flowers in the foreground, flowers that smelled of life and promise. But the waterfall, grass, and flowers were all tinted blue. The same was true for two figures walking through this land of birdsong and bright sunshine, but again all was gauzy, hazy, enveloped in the blue filter, even the burning sun, softened radiation in blue.
The two figures, a man and a woman, looking very much like her and Richard, walked with their hands entwined, their bodies wrapped in one another's. Nearing the curtain of blue, she saw a series of looping, binding ties between them, holding them together like so many horse reins. And now she saw that the hands were not
