Something to make you sick. I-I think I figured out what it is just now.”
He tried to pull himself awake. He knew these words were important but it was difficult to grasp them, like trying to catch greased snakes.
“Look for something wedged in the cracks,” said Peachy. “Something little, no bigger than a finger. Maybe it’s up in the roof.”
He looked up at the roof. It might as well have been miles away. He could barely stay awake, let alone stand.
Peachy said, “It’ll be making a noise. A funny… a funny kind of song, I think.”
Connelly moved to the corner and pressed his back into it for support. Then with trembling legs he pushed himself up the scarred wood but fell once, then twice. On the third he was not standing but was on his feet, leaning into the corner of the cell. Once there he listened carefully, or at least as best he could.
The whine was louder here. It was not an infection. Something in the room was singing to him.
He wiped at his eyes and mouth and found his lips slick with drool. He spat on the floor and then rolled his head to one side. There the whine was fainter. He rolled his head back in the other direction, still listening. It was louder there, painfully loud. It made his teeth hurt just to hear it.
“You find it yet?” said Peachy.
Connelly leaned against the wall and stumbled along it, one ear turned toward its cracks. He passed one crack and the whine was so loud he almost fainted. The room shuddered around him, the light flickering and fading at the corners, like the sound was choking the very air.
He fumbled at the crack, forcing his fingers deep down into it. Finding nothing, he looked higher, fingers wriggling in the small space. He touched something, something rough and smooth at the same time, something knobby at one end. He pushed deeper, fingers toying with the thing’s end, and it fell out and clattered to the floor, the wail intensifying as soon as it was dislodged.
He squatted and looked at it. It was a bone. A small bone, like the thighbone of a chicken or the bone of a man’s foot. It was gray as ditchwater and on its surface were tiny, fine engravings, writing as thin and ghostly as a cobweb, running in rings and circles down its edge. He reached down and with shivering hands picked it up and looked at it and as he brought it close he could hear words in its shrill whine, quiet chanting in some tongue he had never heard before.
“Oh my God,” said Connelly.
“For God’s sake, Connelly, do something,” pleaded Peachy. “It sounds so awful. Break it or something, please.”
Connelly looked at the little bone for a minute longer, then took it in both hands and tried to break it in half. He found he was too weak to do so and so he lodged part of it in a crack in the wall and leaned on the exposed end. The bone bent, then snapped in half and he swore he heard the little bone scream, a yelp like a dog being kicked, and from its broken end something foul and black and thick poured out, covering his hands and running in streaks down the wall. It reeked of chaw spit and spoiled beer and old leaves.
“It’s alive,” he heard himself say. “The goddamn thing is alive.”
As soon as he spoke he felt the air around him clear and the light from above him strengthen, and while the cell was by no means clean or comfortable it felt like bliss after the past days. His head was clear and his heart strong and he felt alive enough to stand on his own feet without leaning.
“Good God,” said Peachy. “Good God, that sounds so much better.”
Connelly breathed deep, in and then out. “Yeah. Yeah, it does. What the hell was that?”
“I think it was a taint,” said Peachy.
“A what?”
“A taint.”
“Last I checked a taint was the part of you between your asshole and your pecker.”
“Well, I don’t know anything about that. I was just thinking about what that old man said and I… I just remembered something the other night. Maybe it was a dream, I don’t know. I remembered something my momma told me once when I was a boy, something to scare us, but sort of a joke, you know? She said there used to be a witch in her neighborhood who could take a bone and put a little bit of her own black soul in it and then she’d hide it in your room and it’d tell you to do things as you slept. She’d write on the bone what you were supposed to do and the bone would whisper to you and in the morning you’d do it. I thought it was crazy.”
“Yeah.”
“But it wasn’t.”
“Think I heard this before,” said Connelly. “From someone else. Said it tainted and poisoned the land.” He shook his head. “Jesus. Jesus Christ. Jesus Christ almighty, things like this don’t happen. Things like this aren’t real.”
“But it did happen,” said Peachy. “It is real.”
Connelly thought about it and said, “Yeah.”
CHAPTER TWENTY
The next day when the deputies dropped off his gruel and water Connelly grabbed the tin plate and ate hungrily. They did not laugh and reacted with some surprise and he heard their footfalls quickly fall away.
“Going to be trouble,” said Connelly.
“Yeah,” said Peachy.
But there was not. The two of them waited in silence, letting the hours pass by, yet no one came. There was no sound at all. The entire jail was quiet.
As night fell a gray sheet of clouds crawled over the moon. The wind rose until it hammered the building and the temperature dropped until the two men shivered and they began to see their breath. Somewhere in Connelly’s belly the animal thing yowled and cried, full of strange knowledge of being hunted, of something watching out in the night.
“What’s going on?” asked Peachy through the crack in the wall.
“Something’s coming,” said Connelly.
Less than an hour later the sheriff came for him. Two deputies put him in handcuffs and marched him down to the cinderblock room where the sheriff had beaten them not more than a week ago, by Connelly’s reckoning. He cuffed Connelly to the stool and looked at him without speaking, eyes heavy as though he was envious of him. Then he took his pistol and whipped Connelly across the side of the head. Connelly curled in his seat and the sheriff bent down and spat into his face. He looked at Connelly a moment longer and then left, shutting the door behind him.
Connelly sat and tried to recover. No one else entered. Minutes ticked by. He waited, trying to stay conscious.
Soon he was aware of a horrible stench in the room, a stink of putrefaction and lye. He coughed and tried to find some pocket of fresh air.
A quiet, cold voice said, “You’re taller than I remember.”
Connelly looked up and around for the source of the voice. At first he saw nothing. Then he spotted a pair of scuffed shoes in the shadows next to the desk, and above those a pair of patched trousers and a coat the color of trainsmoke with gray-white hands nestled in its folds like chunks of quartz in granite. And somewhere above that he could make out a face, queerly colorless, heavily lined, with calm, placid eyes like jet and ribbons of scars running across its cheeks, its forehead, its neck and brow, a delicate calligraphy of violence.
Connelly was bellowing before he knew what was going on. He strained forward in his seat and planted his legs and pulled until the cuffs bit into his wrists and his palms were wet with blood. The gray man did not seem to
