IN the pitch-dark stall, Maureen DeCampe, at the same moment that Purdy's farm was being dug up, felt like a cornered and wounded animal, her strength sapped but her mind raging with anger and hatred for her pursuer. In the darkness, she blindly pulled down an ancient horse harness with metal fasteners as large as studs. As Purdy now approached, she readied herself. Taking a mighty swing at the old man's face, she sent the harness and its metal parts into his eyes, lacerating his forehead and sending him to his knees, temporarily blinded.
Disorientated for a moment, he raged and lashed out with the pitchfork he'd snatched from Nancy Willis's body. He next stumbled backward, and she ran past him and out into the night to find herself below the firmament of a star-filled sky.
“ My God, I'm not in Iowa,” she muttered, realizing instantly that the landscape of rolling foothills and cleft valleys didn't compute. She saw the lonely, old, dilapidated farmhouse on the rise, so she was on an isolated farmstead, but this was not Iowa. If she knew one thing for certain, this was not the Iowa she had always her entire life heard about. It was not colorless enough, not characterless enough, and certainly not flat enough to be Iowa. Texas? Were they near Huntsville, where he'd picked up Jimmy Lee for this horror ride? No, the land was not ochre or sand brown. In fact, this area was a mix of boulders and verdant greenery with a forest of black trees standing silent and ancient.
No time to cipher it out.
As she ran blindly away from the bam and scene of her torture, she saw a large collection of faded, whitewashed factory buildings surrounded with ten-foot-high fences. Between these two extremes-silent, dark forest and silent, run-down factory-she opted for the man-made structures in the hope of finding help. However, the old factory looked lonelier than the ancient farmhouse and the bam from which she had run. Still, some lights burned there, sending shards of light and shadow out from its center.
The odor from the factory assailed her nostrils, but it was a welcome relief from the odor of decay from which she ran. Still, the air around the place choked on sulfur-filled gas belching from two enormous smokestacks. She guessed it to be some sort of chemical factory, possibly a paint factory. She might find someone, a guard, a night watchman perhaps, who might help her. A telephone that fucking worked! If she could get inside the fence, get to a phone…
TWELVE
Evil is easy, and has infinite forms.
Isaiah Purdy had regained his vision and was now fueled with anger, and with Jimmy Lee's horrid laughter piercing his eardrums, he gave chase. With Jimmy Lee's dead voice telling Isaiah that he was made a fool, being bested by a damned woman, the old man, with his cattle prod in hand, raced after Maureen, muttering to himself until she came in view.
He saw that she was heading for that old chemical factory buttressing the property. And even with the distance between them, he could see that she had spotted him.
Then she vanished. One moment in his sight, the next gone, like a deer in a leafy wood. She'd seen him coming, and she had dropped into a shaft of black shadow this moonless night. He carried a rope alongside the cattle prod. He meant to hog-tie her and drag her, like a squealing animal, back to Jimmy Lee.
It's what Jimmy Lee said he wanted now.
“ I'll get the bitch, Jimmy Lee, and I'll cozy the two of you up again just as soon's I do. Don't you be worrying none. Not one bit.”
Jimmy Lee would make her pay for this in the next life, just as Isaiah had made that snoopy-assed realtor pay in this life. Felt good to put the prongs of the pitchfork dead through her like I done, he thought.
Maureen DeCampe had seen the old bastard bent on slowly murdering her as he came over the rise, the man's frame, rope, and what looked like the cattle prod silhouetted against the sky when a dry lightning bolt lit up the heavens. He looked for all the world like a maniacal biblical prophet out of history. Just then, the moon peeked through an opening in the clouds. She quickly hid among some barrels just outside the fence gate. A sign proclaimed the place to be Midlothian Tool amp; Die, but the sign appeared ancient, and it remained questionable exactly what sort of place this was, except that it reeked of petroleum and alcohol and carbide odors, with a touch of methane. The old sign looked like something left over from another era. The place could just as well be a gin mill today.
She inched along the fence, not certain where or how close Isaiah Purdy might be at this moment. Having taken her eyes off him once, she'd lost his gray form in the surrounding gloom.
Still, she heard animal noises. Was it Purdy? No, it was something sounding trapped, the poor creature crying and whining off deep in the woods. She heard the pitter-patter of scurrying mice and rats among the discarded boards and barrels on the other side of the fence. In all the time she had been here, she had not heard a farm animal, not so much as a dog bark or a cat meow. Now she heard someone whistling, and she turned to stare at a man on the other side of the fence, not a hundred yards from her, lighting up a cigarette. His bulk stretched the idea of comfort in a uniform with white shirt and blue patch, the knit badge of a security guard. Her heart skipped a beat at seeing the man, as it had at seeing Nancy Willis, but Nancy lay dead now as a direct result of helping Maureen, and she was keenly aware that approaching the man certainly put him in as much danger, but she had no choice. In her condition, without help, she was not going to get free of Isaiah Purdy. Purdy had made her an expert on helplessness.
She rushed along the fence, banging, calling out, when suddenly she felt the sting of an electric bolt streak through her being, toppling her and sending her into unconsciousness, but in one instant before she lost consciousness, she realized that she was again in Purdy's hands.
“ Hey, old man! How're you doing tonight?” shouted the security guard. “What's all the ruckus?”
“ Damn varmints-rats!” Purdy called back in his most casual tone, while Maureen DeCampe lay in a patch of blackness at his feet.
“ Hate the damn things. Why'd God make 'em in the first place? To torment good people like us?” asked the guard, puffing on his cigarette.
“ What's it they say? Lord works in mysterious ways?”
“ Is that your final answer?” he joked, mimicking a now world famous game show host. “You think the same is true in His creating the mosquitoes and the gnats?” The guard swatted at something that bit his forearm.
“ OK, my friend,” Purdy added, “God didn't make rats at all.”
“ Didn't? Then who? Satan?”
“ My friend, rats came along for the ride, came out of the evil men do. They're here to remind us of our sinful natures, same as those stone statues-gargoyles. Hell, we're all just like 'em.”
“ Just like who?”
“ Rats! Ain't you listening, son?” Purdy cleared his throat and pulled on his chewing tobacco, one foot on top of the game he'd just hunted down, keenly aware that if the moon should return, or if another lightning strike lit up the place, the guard would see what lay at the old man's feet. He thought on the one hand how he might need to get a few steps closer to the guard, that he might need to zap him with the cattle prod, and on the other hand, he thought, I gotta get her up and outta here, but I can't so long as this idiot is talking to me.
“ There are some among us who can't help but give in to that nature.” Purdy fished for words to extricate himself from the conversation.
“ Nature of the rat, you mean?”
“ Chinese have it on their calendar-year of the rat.” old man now wondered if babbling would work, in hopes that the younger man would grow bored and end it and walk off. “Yeah… hey yeah, and the Chinese are 'sposed to be real smart.”
