Inheritance: A Novel Part 49

Martin dusted off his hands and rested them on his thighs. They looked large and powerful. But his voice was delicate. It touched something vulnerable inside of Paul and coaxed it up to the surface, for his father's voice was resonating inside his head, too, lulling him into a quiet ease. The world around him turned to heat shimmers and grew dark. For a moment, nearly everything but the sound of his father's voice dropped away.

Paul's fingers had slipped off the handcuff key and his head rolled on his shoulders.

Would it be so bad to just stand up and let my father lead me into the new world? Would it really be that bad?

"The thing is, Paul, a boy's always gonna feel like he's grounded to this world while he's got his mother in it. You know what I mean? You tell me now that you would have followed me, and I'm sure you believe it, but I wonder if that's true. Don't you see? I couldn't take that chance with you. You got a different destiny laid out for you, son. You've been called upon to do a lot more than just fix a world that's dying. You've been called upon to tear it down and build a new one up in its place. That means you've got to kill this world before you can make it new again. Do you think you could kill a world that's got your mother in it? I had to create distance between you and her."

Something Magdalena said just before she died came back to him. You need to center yourself in this world. Only your love in this world can do that. Find something worth holding on to, because the dead will take you over when you quit loving this world.

The Barber fifty cent piece was still in his front pocket. It had helped him once already. It could help him again. He couldn't touch it with his fingers, but there were other ways to touch it. He reached out and closed his mind around it, thinking of Rachel, and he found he could shut out his father's voice almost completely. The man was still talking, but it was like he was standing on the other side of a gla.s.s now.

Paul took up the handcuff key again. He twisted his hand up and around the base of the handcuffs and probed with his finger until he found the keyhole. Careful to keep his mind clear and his movements slight, for he thought his father could still read his body language even if he couldn't penetrate into his mind, he worked the key first one way and then the other until he felt it catch and the ratchet arm release.

Martin Henninger stood up and looked down at his son. Did he sense his control over his son fading? Paul stared back at him from his knees and thought maybe he did. One cuff was off now and he was working on the other one. His father turned then and walked to the center of the chamber, where a large wooden pole rose ten feet into the air. His father motioned to a group of dead men standing in the shadows of the chamber wall and they brought forth a pair of huge Angora goats on leather leashes and tied them to the pole. Then the dead men slipped back into the shadows.

"Have you figured out yet what this ceremony means?" Martin said, turning to face Paul.

The other cuff came loose.

The Barber, Paul thought. Focus on the Barber.

"The goats are a symbol," Paul said, "of what happens to the world. One dies in sacrifice so that the other can be born anew."

"That's right. That's good, Paul."

Paul took the cuffs in his right hand, holding the connecting chain in his fist. The two ratchet arms swung loose from either side of his fist.

Don't ever let a bad guy get a hold of your cuffs, one of his tactics instructors at the Academy had said. They start swinging those things around, with that ratchet arm swinging free, they can tear you to ribbons.

At the base of the pole was a shallow bra.s.s bowl, and inside that a loose arrangement of oily wood chips, Lebanese Cedar. Martin struck a match with his thumbnail and dropped it into the bowl. The flame shrank away almost immediately and a thin, acrid-smelling column of smoke rose from the bowl, which Martin set down again at the base of the pole.

He put a hand on the head of each goat and spoke a few words over each. His voice was low, the words indistinct, but Paul knew what was being said. Even with his mind holding tightly to the Barber, his father's chanting was blaring inside his head like he was standing inside the throat of a ship's foghorn. And then his father grabbed one of the goats by the neck in his left hand and lifted it until the animal stood eye to eye with him, its back hooves kicking at the ground for purchase. With his right hand he removed his knife from his belt and quickly sliced the animal open from its throat to its a.n.u.s.

He let the carca.s.s fall to the ground.

The other goat he untied from the pole and turned it around to face Paul.

"Do you know why you must take the Scapegoat's heart as your own?"

Paul turned his gaze from the dead goat to his father. The Barber. The Barber.

"No clue," he said.

"You do, Paul. Think about it, boy. The world that's about to be born is symbolized by what's inside this animal. When you take its heart inside your body it beats beside your own. You become a bridge between what's gone and what's to be. You become the link that connects both of them. You become balance incarnate."

Martin brought the animal forward, so that it was standing right in front of Paul.

"You see it now? You see that by containing both worlds inside yourself, you inherit them both? That is important, boy. I want you to tell me you understand."

Paul's mind felt like it was stuck in mud. He struggled up towards consciousness, fighting against the noise his father was making in his head.

The Barber, the Barber, he thought.

He pictured the coin solidly in his mind, and gradually spokes of light formed from behind it, lighting a sort of corona around it. His father's voice grew quiet, less insistent, and the nightmare images of the world overrun by the dead shredded like tissue and scattered on the wind. The light behind the coin continued to grow stronger. It should have blinded him, Paul thought, but it didn't hurt to look at. In fact it seemed to spread a warmth through him, like something good was trying to reach for him. And then at once it came to him.

"Momma."

His father recoiled from him.

"Say the words, Paul. Tell me you see what this means."

Paul looked his father in the eye, and the faintest trace of a smile played at the corner of his mouth.

"Do you know what I see, Daddy?"

Martin waited.

"All I see is a dead man."

He sprang to his feet then and swung the cuffs at his father's face.

Paul's fist connected with his father's jaw and the contact sent a spike of pain up through the nerves of his right arm. It was like somebody had jammed an ice cold piece of metal up through the marrow cavity of his bone.

Paul fell backwards, holding back a scream, but only barely.

The cuffs had left a pair of jagged gouges in his father's cheeks. Black soot poured out of the wounds and drifted away on the breeze like windblown sand. But the wounds didn't stay open for long. As Paul watched, they healed over.

Martin's black Stetson had fallen to the ground. He picked it up and dusted off the brim and seated it back on his head. Then he turned his attention back to Paul.

"Boy," he said, "sometimes, you ain't got no smarts at all."

He stepped forward and grabbed Paul by the shoulders and shook him the way a dog does a stuffed rabbit.

Paul threw an upper cut that caught his father under the chin, but Martin's head barely moved. He took a step back and short punched Paul in the mouth. Paul's vision went black and he rocked back on his heels and teetered there for a moment before he started to fall backwards.

"Get over there," his father said, and grabbed him by the front of his uniform jersey and threw him into the pole.

Paul's head and back crashed into the pole at the same time and it knocked the air from his lungs. For a moment, his vision went purple. He let out a low, stuttering groan and started to slide down to the ground. His father caught him by the throat and hoisted him back to his feet. Paul's eyelids fluttered involuntarily. He tried to speak, but his father's fingers were wrapped too tightly around his throat. He managed a whistling gasp and that was all.

"Why do you think you have to fight me, boy?"

Paul couldn't answer.

His father removed his belt, and exactly as he had done six years before, wrapped the belt around Paul's throat so that he was lashed to the pole. Then he fed it through the buckle and yanked it tight and pushed the tine through the leather. The loose end he let fall against Paul's chest like a necktie.

"I told you once before, boy. It's gonna happen, one way or the other. Might as well come to me willingly."

"Go to h.e.l.l," Paul gasped.

"I won't get to go there with you, Paul. I can open the doorway for you, but it'll be up to you to take this world there yourself. You'll see."

Then he grabbed the scapegoat just as he had done the first goat and raised it up with one hand. Paul heard it bleat with a small, scared voice. Its eyes were rolling wildly in its head, but its body was hanging limply from his father's fist.

Martin pulled the knife from his belt and held it so Paul could see.

"Make yourself ready, boy. This is where it starts."

They stepped into the circular chamber suddenly, unexpectedly. Anderson had been certain they were still several levels below the entrance, and he had been right about to say so when they rounded a corner and emerged into the starlit chamber.

They both gasped at the same time.

Paul was there, lashed to a wooden pole. The air smelled of death and blood and dust. That terrible sense of crushing defeat and pain he'd felt in the presence of the dead men was palpable here as well, and though he couldn't see them, he knew they were there.

As it was, all his attention was focused on the man in the black Stetson cowboy hat. He was standing a short distance in front of Paul, whose head was sagging to his chest and whose face was dark with blood, with a goat suspended in one hand. It took Anderson a moment to take all that in. The goat had to weigh two hundred and fifty pounds, and yet this man held it up one-handed as though it was an empty potato sack.

The man turned to face them. And Paul looked at them, but his face was too badly battered to show any emotion. Anderson stared from one to the other and he was immediately struck by the resemblance. They were obviously father and son. Anderson tried to raise a hand to touch Rachel on her shoulder, but his arm felt like it weighed a ton. He had seen movement in the shadows off to his right, and now that movement had turned into the dusky silhouettes of dead men shambling forward on broken legs, arms raised in a gesture that seemed like they were begging.

He took a step back. Rachel gasped beside him. More of the dead men were advancing on them from the left.

Everything he knew told him to turn around and run, and the impulse was so strong that he did turn around. But he didn't run. He couldn't have, even if his fear had gotten the better of him, for there were more of the dead men coming up behind them. They were cut off completely.

He and Rachel were back to back. He felt her grab his wrist, and for a moment he was certain she was as scared as he was. But then she relaxed her grip. Her hand moved down to his fingers and squeezed.

"Look," she said.

He turned, and what he saw, despite all his fear, made him stare in wonder. A woman had stepped out of the shadows behind Paul. She was small and thin, almost boney, and yet she radiated light. It filled her eyes and her skin was glowing.

She walked up behind Paul and stopped.

"Martin," she said.

Paul couldn't turn around, but he could feel the hand on his shoulder. He could sense his mother's presence as clearly as he could his father's. Light was pouring into the circular chamber, swirling around him, warming him, comforting him.

"Martin, I won't let you have him."

It was her voice. It was getting stronger, just as the light was getting stronger.

Paul's father turned around. He still held the goat in one hand, the knife in the other.

"Get away from here," he hissed.

"I won't let you have him," she said again. And then she stepped around Paul's right side and into his field of view. She was glowing. Golden gleaming light scattered from her hair.

Martin Henninger threw the goat to one side. It hit the ground heavily on one side and lay there, too stunned to move. He held the knife up, and the light from Carol Henninger glinted off it so brightly the blade seemed to turn molten in his hand. His father turned away from the light and the hand that had held the knife was up now in front of his eyes. Martin Henninger's face was twisted in rage, and he was still hissing at his wife, Get out of here. Get out of here. But he couldn't look at her. He couldn't even hold his head up now.

She crossed the remaining distance between them and folded him up in her arms. He struggled, but it did him no good. The more he fought, the brighter the rays of light between them became. It filled everything now, and from somewhere in the swirling brilliance, Paul could hear his father shrieking in rage and pain.

The dead men had been slowly closing in on them, but they too were stopped in their tracks. One of the men had stopped right in front of Paul. A stray ray of light hit the dead man in the face and burned him away to ash within seconds.

There was an explosion of light and wind that hit Paul full on, filling up everything in his world at once. Yet there was no heat, and the light didn't hurt his eyes. There was only white, and the sense that, for a moment, something powerful beyond measure had pa.s.sed through him and was pulling away, drifting off into nothingness.

When the light faded, and he was able to see again, he stared out across the barren floor of the chamber and saw ashes circling in the air. Rachel was there, standing next to Anderson, and she was coming towards him, closer, closer, her hands on his face.

Chapter 26.

After the explosion, Anderson drifted in and out. His son John put an arm around him and asked him if he was all right, could he walk. "Sure," he said, and stumbled on his damaged right leg and fell to one knee. John picked him up again and led him away from the circular chamber. He was stronger than Anderson remembered. "Are those sirens I hear?" he said, and turned and smiled at his son. John was wearing a dusty, sweat-stained patrolman's utility uniform. His silver badge glittered in the starlight. His hair was cut to a regulation one and a half inches. Anderson was about to ask the boy when he'd cut it, how he'd found the time after he died, but he just closed his eyes instead. He had a hazy sense of things happening around him. They were climbing down stairs and over catwalks and through debris. When his vision cleared again John was handing him off to Bobby Cantrell, his face still bearing that frozen, surprised expression it had had on the autopsy table.

You're gonna be okay, Keith. Just take my hand. Come on now.

"Thanks, Bobby," he said.

"Huh?" Rachel said. She was down on the catwalk below him, looking up at him, one hand extended to take his.

Anderson blinked, and when he opened his eyes again, both Bobby and John were gone.

"Are you okay, Keith?" Rachel asked.

"Fine," he said. "I was talking to an old friend."

"Right," she said. "Okay, we're gonna get you an ambulance."

They made their way down to ground level. Rachel carried his right side, the hurt side, but Paul stood at his left and carried his weight. The world grew hazy again as they stepped onto the asphalt drive that led down to where their car was parked. There were bright lights down there, lots of them. Out of the flickering blaze Anderson saw a stream of dead men and women coming his way. He saw every murder victim, every suicide, every traffic fatality he had ever investigated, and they were coming up the hill towards him. Some were speaking his name.

They seemed so urgent, so concerned.

Anderson's eyelids fluttered open. Bobby Cantrell was looking down at him, then at the blood pressure cuff around his arm. Anderson was on his back, strapped down. The bed jostled under him, and for a moment he felt like he was on a boat. Bobby was swaying, too, but he seemed used to the movement.

"Why are we moving, Bobby?"

"Excuse me?" It was an EMS technician talking to him.

"Where's Bobby?"

"You lost a lot of blood there, partner. Just hang tight, okay? We're taking you to University Hospital. Is there somebody you want us to call?"

"Where's Bobby?" Anderson said again.