Apocalypse Read online

  “Not that way, they’re not supposed to come up,” she said.

  “Well, that’s the way I’d do it,” said Elspeth with knife-edge of envy in her voice. And with a shadowed awe, the admiration of an artist for another—for a mystery artist, work exhibited but identity unknown. “If I were taking Hoadley down, I’d do it with a chorus, a swarming of the dead. That’s just the way I’d do it.”

  Shirley said, “So who’s doing it? A witch, or—or God, or what?”

  “How the hell should I know?” Elspeth reverted to her customary peevishness. “And what the hell can it possibly matter?”

  “It matters.” Shirley tried, ineffectually, to explain herself. “It’s not like we’re just talking here. It’s happening.”

  “We don’t really know what’s happening,” said Cally.

  “Don’t we?” said Gigi.

  The four horsewomen rode back to the stable in silence. Elspeth’s sword chafed against her leg; she had not touched it since leaving the barn, and no one seemed to find it odd that she had not used it on anything, not even on blackberries.

  There were plenty of dead babies in the ground around and under Hoadley. Aboriginal babies, among others. The town had been founded on blood-soaked ground. The first settlers, stalwart Pennsylvania Germans, had massacred or driven away all the savages they had found in the area, in retribution for an Indian raid (distant, probably by another tribe) on another frontier settlement. With the natives duly dispatched, they had set themselves to making the place a new Eden.

  It was an Eden slow in coming, as the stony hills did not take well to farming. The growing season was short, the winters long, the labor hard. More babies died, babies white as wheat flour, joining the red ones under the ground: pale babies dead of pneumonia and “teething” and scarlet fever and “paralysis” and a hundred other diseases, and sometimes of starvation, neglect or abuse. Whole families died or moved to more fertile ground.

  But wherever any folk at all remained, food had to be grown. By the nineteenth century, Eden had at last been established. Hoadley was a country village, an isolated hamlet, picturesquely located amid the Canadawa Range of the Appalachians on the banks of swift-flowing, crystalline Trout Creek; just below the village, the river plunged over fern-draped falls into a gorge that ran for a mile and a half, every inch of it lovely with moss and cliffside and huge old trees and leaf-sifted light on the sweet water. The place was known as far away as Pittsburgh as a beauty spot. An artist’s colony of sorts became established there, and in the summer society people came to improve their minds in the peaceful contemplation of art, nature and each other. There were a few rooming houses, a general store, and one good hotel for the summer visitors, where downstairs the artists drank ale.

  Then someone discovered coal.

  Within the year the village had turned to a wildly thriving boom town, with new buildings thrown up daily as the mines bored down and the money flowed the way the stream once had. All the trees for miles were gone, cut down to make tipples and railroad ties and mine timbers, and the smoke of burning debris filled the air. Trout Creek ran choked with mud, its course diverted under new roads, around new buildings. Concrete supports stood atop the waterfall, carrying the black railroad bridge overhead. On every available inch of the valley the mine-town row houses were going up for the immigrant workers flooding in, the Irish, Italians, Poles, Lithuanians, Slavs, Greeks.

  For fifty years Hoadley experienced unparalleled prosperity and appalling poverty. There were twelve tailors in what had once been the place where the road crossed the creek, and twenty barbers, and doctors and lawyers building great gingerbreaded houses on the hillsides only a little below the mansions of mine owners. In the row houses down below the tracks, down by the sulfurous stream, where the black bony piles shut out the air, lived the coal miners’ women, the dun-skinned women the “natives” called “foreigners,” barefoot women who sometimes out of desperation ended or hid their pregnancies, strangled their newborns, entombed tiny tan bodies in the walls.

  Then the many-branched deep mines reached the end of the coal. And the mine barons moved out of the mansions on the hilltops, leaving behind miles of rusting railroad, acres of slag, row on row of sparrow-brown mine town houses beneath hills scrubby with second-growth woods. Trout Creek, orange and lifeless with acid mine runoff. The waterfall and the gorge, junked with discarded machinery. The air, polluted enough to turn even new-fallen snow black with the smoke from the steel mills roaring farther down the valley.

  Then the steel mills closed also, and the air, sullied only by house coal, was somewhat cleaner again (though not the earth or the creek), and half the row houses in Hoadley were boarded up and empty, and the people who remained supped deep of the mysteries of Unemployment Compensation and Welfare and Food Stamps and Government Surplus Cheese. There was a flood like the wrath of God, coming to wash the refuse out of Trout Creek gorge. A dead baby floated down the bloated stream. The people who remained in Hoadley learned the ways of the Red Cross and Federal Disaster Aid. Rebuilding, they went about their business with cautious eyes and no poetry in their souls, not daring to hope in anything. These were the sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters of the Irish and Italian and Polish and Lithuanian and Slavic miners. Some few were the Pennsylvania German descendants of the the original settlers, and went to the Lutheran and Brethren churches instead of the many Roman Catholic ones, and gave themselves airs. But they all remembered a time when men had worked twelve hours a day in the dark and couldn’t ever get ahead of the Godawful gouging rent, the constant debt at the overpriced company store. They remembered men dying under the guns and clubs of strikebreakers. They remembered men going berserk and killing their wives, each other, their babies. They remembered all the babies dead, the stillborn and those who lived a few days or years, all the little ones for whom there was seldom milk and sometimes no bread.

  Much evil had been done in Hoadley.

  A council of such cautious-eyed citizens met the fourth Thursday of May: the borough council sat at its regular monthly meeting. Seven men, mostly substantial and oviform, and two high-coiffed women in rhinestoned glasses sat around the long table. One of the women took notes. All church councils, school boards, library boards and such governing bodies in Hoadley had to include at least one woman to be secretary. Men, apparently, did not know how to write minutes, though they sometimes made coffee.

  A motion had been proposed that an ordinance should be formulated to ban pit bull terriers from the borough. No one in the area owned such an animal, nor to any council member’s knowledge did anyone in Hoadley plan to own a pit bull terrier, but a council has to have something to do at its monthly meetings. The motion had opened a far-ranging discussion on dogs and dog ownership, and the council was discussing the banning of chronically barking dogs, and how many woofs over what period of time defined the term “nuisance barking,” when council president Gerald Wozny thought of yet another possible pet ordinance.

  “What I mean,” he said, “we ought to forbid dogs and cats from defecating on anybody’s property but their own. Their owner’s, I mean.”

  “What about urinating?” one of the women, the one not taking notes, wanted to know.

  “Defecating leaves a pile. Urinating don’t matter.”

  “If it’s on shrubs it does,” challenged the woman. “Kills the shrubs.”

  “My neighbor’s dog used to come and piss on my eggplants,” complained the only thin man in the gathering. “Would you like to eat eggplants had a dog pee on them?”

  “All right, then, defecating and urinating both. Producing bodily wastes. The dog or cat is only allowed to do it on their own—their owner’s property. What do you say?”

  The council was saved from discussion of the impact, constitutionality and enforceability of this proposal by a knock on the door. A tall, husky woman no one recognized came into the room, followed by a smaller young woman everyone knew by sight: the breedy oddball who ro
de her horse to the post office.

  “Shirley Danyo here.” The first one loudly announced the reason for her visit. “Me’n my friends want youse guys to know about some plenty strange things been going on.”

  Though Elspeth had come with Shirley, she did none of the talking. She stood by, quietly and contentedly conscious of her exotic beauty, as Shirley explained, in Shirley’s own inimitably voluminous fashion, about her hex sign, the cicadas out of season, the naked fetch in the woods, the baby-faced bugs.

  Without surprise Elspeth observed the council members glancing at each other, then growing too uncomfortable to glance at each other. They had, of course, already heard about the mysterious far-too-beautiful woman on the white horse. She had appeared again, on foot, at dusk, to speak to some ignorant people in Hoadley park. Tacitly the council had agreed to ignore her presence in favor of the more pressing problem of dog excrement. The national government could have learned from Hoadley natives; the latter had used censorship for generations. Entire scenes of Hoadley history had been erased from the books and had therefore never happened. Council discussions often went unnoted, to be denied if necessary. The woman on the white horse, undiscussed, therefore did not exist.

  Instinctively, then, the members of the council did not want to hear any of what this fool Danyo was saying. They rooted their hind ends deeper into their chairs, stared down at their hands and composed elaborate arrangements with their fingers. The president poked discreetly at nose and ears with his pinkie, finding nothing to distract him from his ordeal. Danyo had to be a jackass, a screwball at best, and at worst downright dangerous to say such things.

  Knowing that Shirley had never been afraid of being considered a nuthead, Elspeth allowed herself to feel darkly amused.

  “What I mean,” Shirley concluded earnestly, “it looks like the end of the world, unnatural things happening.”

  “We were discussing business before you came in,” hinted the council president.

  “I won’t take but a minute longer. What I wanted to say, what if it ain’t God? What if it’s a witch? If that’s what it is, youse guys ought to be able to stop it.”

  A few of the council members actually blushed, as if Shirley had ripped open her work shirt and exposed her breasts. All except the woman taking notes looked profoundly discomfited. The latter (Zephyr Zook by name), as secretary, found Shirley somewhat more bearable and less offensive to her sense of parliamentary procedure than President Wozny.

  “Ahhh—we will refer your concerns to the appropriate departments,” said that gentleman, and he got up and laid a hand on Shirley’s elbow, as if he could steer her out of the room that way. Shirley looked down at him, and he removed the hand.

  Elspeth spoke for the first time, with wry pride in her voice. “C’mon, Shirl. These people have other business to discuss.”

  Shirley acknowledged Elspeth with a nod, then looked hard at Wozny. She was not stupid; she had known before she came that whatever she might say would do no good. But being Shirley, she had to try anyway. “Them was babies crying,” she declared to the round man before her. “Ghost babies. Something’s bothering their rest, I tell you.” She left without waiting for a reply, and Elspeth left with her.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I told you libraries is nice places. I ain’t much of a reader, but after Joanie went away I started hanging around the Hoadley library anyways. It wasn’t but a little ways from the funeral home down past the hardware store and a couple boarded-up stores and the Goodwill to where they’d put the library in another of them stores, and I’d go down there when I was done with the bodies. In there with all them books I felt like Joanie wasn’t so far away. Anyways, old Beulah Coe the librarian knowed Joanie. I kept asking her if she’d seed her.

  “Barry,” she says, “you think she’s folded herself up inside a book, or what?” But I still kept asking. I didn’t know what else to do.

  There was another boy, Garrett, hung around in there too. I guess he wasn’t really a boy. He was a lot older than me, probably as old as my mom, but he didn’t act old. He always brought lots of dominoes with him in his pockets, and he’d pull them out and set them all up on their ends on the big library table, around and around in circles. He’d take maybe a couple hours doing it. And then he’d take and touch one and knock them all down in a minute. It was real pretty to watch, the way they all rippled down. Sometimes he let me touch the one to knock them down. Or he’d let the little kids that come in the library do it. He liked it when the little kids paid attention to him. That was all he come for, was to set up his dominoes and knock them down and make them do flips and like that. He was real smart with dominoes. Other than that he was dumb like me. The little kids liked him because he looked normal except his head was big. That seemed fanny to me, that Garrett was dumb like me with his head as big as it was. A person would think he should have been smart. But his face looked okay and he set his dominoes up good so the little kids liked him. They was scared of me because my face was marked up and ugly.

  Garrett and me talked sometimes, hanging around the library, and when he found out I worked for Mr. Wilmore he started making dumb undertaker jokes. “Hey, Barry,” he’d say, “how’s business up there? Dead, huh? Going in the hole?” And then he’d heehaw laugh. “Hey, Barry. Didja hear the one about the undertaker had two bodies at once, a bank president and a lawyer? And he got them in the wrong caskets? And when the families complained, he said he’d switch them? And in them three-piece suits nobody ever noticed he just switched the heads?” Hee-haw, hee-haw. “Hey, Barry. Didja hear the one about the undertaker got married? And on his wedding night he told his bride take off all her clothes, but he couldn’t get it up? So he told her go in the bathroom and get in a tub of cold water for a while, and when she came back to bed she should just close her eyes and lie real still?” Garret snorted when he laughed, too, in between hee-haws.

  He tried to call me “Digger,” too, but that didn’t work because I didn’t dig graves. They got backhoes to do that. It didn’t make me mad none, the way he talked about undertakers. Mr. Wilmore was a funeral director, and funeral directors is different from undertakers.

  So I talked to Garret different times, and I’m glad I did, because I guess I must have told him about Joanie, and he’s the one told me to go see Ahira.

  “You gotta go look at her,” he says. “She’ll get your mind off that Musser girl.” And he laughs like he said something smart.

  “I don’t want my mind off Joanie,” I says.

  “Then go and ask her about your sweetie, for crying out loud, and quit asking everybody else.”

  Ahira knowed about stuff like that, he says.

  So I went that night. Garrett told me where. There was this little park between the post office and the bank, don’t hardly deserve to be called a park, just a patch of grass and a couple benches for the old geezers to loaf on and a statue of some army guy on a horse. But there was this little round building there too, sort of a picnic pavilion, pointed like a circus tent only it was made of wood. Every year at Christmas the town put lights on it, and it looked real pretty, like a carnival ride. Except they always forgot to take them down till about the fourth of July, so half the rest of the time it looked dumb.

  Anyways, this was May, and the lights was still hanging on the bandstand—people called it the bandstand, but Joanie always said that wasn’t what it was, it was a gazebo, but I never heard nobody else say gazebo, but I never seed no band on it neither—only them lights wasn’t lit, and they looked dumb. They looked like that junk old ladies hang around the tops of their porches. But Garrett says this is the place where Ahira comes every night.

  So I hung around, and after a while she come. And as soon as I seen her I knowed she was the one Mrs. Wilmore kept talking about, the lady on the white horse. She didn’t have no horse with her, but no two people in Hoadley could be that beautiful.

  She come at dusk, in a white dress down to her feet and kind of floating around h
er, and her hair was down her back and lifting like soft yellow wings each side of her face, so she come like a white-and-yellow butterfly. And her feet was bare, and just as beautiful as the rest of her. Don’t ask me how that could be so, because feet is generally ugly, but hers was nice. And her face was beautiful like an old painting, wide at the top where her big eyes was, then coming down to a little chin, like her face was a heart. But strong. Like them schoolbook pictures of Joan of Arc or somebody. And her mouth was full and sweet-looking and real still. Right away, before she even opened her mouth to talk, I felt like she was somebody who knowed, just from looking at her. Not just thought she knowed, but really knowed, like God.

  She went up there on that bandstand, and there was already people standing around waiting for her down below, like Garrett and me, and she called out over our heads, “Misfits! Come to me! All you people who sleep alone and fondle yourselves and have messy dreams in the night, come to me! All you bent-out-of-shape, stomped-on people, all you thumb-suckers, bed-wetters, the ones the world looks down on, come here; I am Ahira, and I want you.”

  And they come, too, more every minute. I hadn’t thought till then how many freaky people like me there was in Hoadley, because we mostly all hid ourselves away. But they come out that night, like bats coming out in the dusk, out of places can’t nobody believe, them little narrow places under the eaves. There was the old woman who always smelled like a hamster, and the skinny one whose back was so bent she looked at the ground all the time when she walked, and her head went back and forth like she was sniffing her way with it. She had to sit down on the ground to look up at Ahira. And there was the man who walked on the stumps of his legs and wore big leather feet on them, like elephant feet. And there was the blind guy with the paper bag on his head. His face looked okay, not ugly like mine, but he hardly ever showed it, only on real hot days. Most of the time he kept a paper bag on. I guess it didn’t make no difference to him if he had a paper bag on his head. I guess he wore it to keep warm.