“All right kids, out of the kitchen. Get upstairs,” Scales shouted as they came into the house and removed their coats. “We gotta talk in private. Go on, git.” He shooed his hands at some of the children who were clustered in the hallway, staring at Walter Hardesty’s pistol. “Sarah! Mitchell! Upstairs, now.” He led them into the kitchen and a woman as thin as Elmer shot up out of a chair, clasping her hands. “Mr. James, Mr. Hawthorne,” she said. “Could you use some coffee?”
“Kitchen towelling, if you please, Mrs. Scales,” Sears said. “Then coffee.”
“Kitchen …”
“To wipe my shoes. Mr. Hawthorne undoubtedly requires the same service.”
The woman looked down in dismay at the lawyer’s shoes. “Oh, good heavens. Here, let me help you …” She took a roll of paper towelling from a cupboard, tore off a long section, and made as if to kneel at Sears’s feet. “That won’t be necessary,” Sears said, taking the wadded paper from her hands. Only Ricky knew that Sears was disturbed, not merely rude.
“Mr. Hawthorne … ?” A bit rattled by Sears’s coldness, the woman turned to Ricky.
“Yes, thank you, Mrs. Scales,” he said. “That’s very kind of you.” He too accepted several sections of the towelling.
“Their throats were cut,” Elmer said to his wife. “What did I tell you? Some crazyman’s been out here. And—” his voice rose “—a crazyman who can fly, because he didn’t leave no prints.”
“Tell them,” his wife said. Elmer looked at her sharply, and she hurried off to put the coffee together.
Hardesty asked, “Tell us what?” No longer in the Wyatt Earp costume, the sheriff was restored to his proper age of fifty. He’s hitting the bottle worse than ever, Ricky thought, seeing the broken veins in Hardesty’s face, the deepening irresolution. For the truth was that, despite his Texas Ranger appearance, the hawk nose, lined cheeks and gunslinger blue eyes, Walt Hardesty was too lazy to be a good sheriff. It was typical of him that he had had to be told to look at the second pair of sheep. And Elmer Scales was right; he should have taken notes.
Now the farmer was preening himself, about to deliver his bombshell. Stringy cords stood out in his neck; his bat ears went a deeper shade of red. “Well hell, I saw him, didn’t I?” His mouth dropped comically, and he surveyed each of them in turn.
“Him,” his wife said in ironic counterpoint behind him.
“Shit, woman, what else?” Scales thumped the table. “Get that coffee ready and stop interrupting.” He turned back to the three men. “As big as me! Bigger! Starin’ at me! Damnedest thing you ever saw!” Enjoying his moment, he spread his arms. “Right outside!
Just a little further than that away from me. How’s them apples?”
“Did you recognize him?” Hardesty asked.
“Didn’t see him that well. Now I’ll tell you how it was.” He was moving around the kitchen, unable to contain himself, and Ricky was reminded of an old perception, that “Our Vergil” wrote poetry because he was too volatile to believe he was not capable of it. “I was in here last night, late. Couldn’t sleep, never could.”
“Never could,” echoed his wife.
Screeches, thumps came from overhead. “Forget the coffee and get on upstairs, straighten ’em out,” Scales said. He paused while she left the room. Soon another voice joined the cacophony above; then the noises ceased.
“Like I said. I was in here, readin’ through a couple-two-three equipment and seed catalogues. Then! I hears something from out near the barn. Prowler! Damn! I jumps up and looks out the window. Seen it was snowin’. Uh oh, work to do tomorrow, I says to myself. Then I seen him. By the barn. Well, between the barn and the house.”
“What did he look like?” Hardesty said, still not taking notes.
“Couldn’t tell! Too dark!” Now his voice had soared from alto to soprano. “Just saw him there, starin’!”
“You saw him in the dark?” Sears asked in a bored voice. “Were your yard lights on?”
“Mr. Lawyer, you gotta be kidding, with electric bills the way they are. No, but I saw him and I knew he was big.”
“Now, how did you know that, Elmer?” asked Hardesty. Mrs. Scales was coming down the uncarpeted stairs—thump thump thump, hard shoes hitting the wooden risers. Ricky sneezed. A child began to whistle, and abruptly ceased as the footsteps paused.
“Because I saw his eyes! Didn’t I? Just starin’ out at me! About six feet above the ground.”
“You just saw his eyes?” asked Hardesty, incredulous.
“What the hell did this guy’s eyes do, Elmer, shine in the dark?”
“You said it,” Elmer replied.
Ricky jerked his head to look at Elmer, who regarded them all with evident satisfaction, and then without meaning to, looked across the table at Sears. He had gone tense and immobile at Hardesty’s last question, trying to let nothing show on his face, and on Sears’s round face he saw the same intention. Sears too. It means something to him too.
“Now I expect you to get him, Walt, and you two lawyers of mine to sue his ass from here to summer,” Elmer said conclusively. “Excuse my language, honey.” His wife was coming into the little kitchen again, and she nodded at his apology, acknowledging its rectitude by tapping it with her chin as it went by, before taking the percolator off the burner.
“Did you see anything last night, Mrs. Scales?” Hardesty asked.
Ricky saw a similar recognition in Sears’s eyes and knew that he had given himself away.
“All I saw was a scared husband,” she said. “I suppose that’s the part he left out.”
Elmer cleared his throat; his Adam’s apple bobbed. “Well. It looked funny.”
“Yes,” Sears said. “I think we know all we need to know. Now if you’ll excuse us, Mr. Hawthorne and I must be getting back to town.”
“You’ll drink your coffee first, Mr. James,” said Mrs. Scales, putting a steaming plastic cup down before him on the tabletop. “If you’re going to sue some monster’s ass from here to summer you’ll need your strength.”
Ricky forced himself to smile, but Walt Hardesty guffawed.
Outside, Hardesty, back in the protective coloration of his Texas Ranger outfit, bent over to speak softly through the three-inch crack Sears had opened in the window. “Are you two going back into town? Could we meet somewhere to have a word or two?”
“Is it important?”
“Might be, might not. I’d like to talk to you, though.”
“Right We’ll go straight to your office.”
Hardesty’s gloved hand went to his chin and caressed it. “I’d rather not talk about this in front of the other boys.”
Ricky sat with his hands on the wheel, his alert face turned to Hardesty, but his mind held only one thought: Its starting. Its starting and we don’t even know what it is.
“What do you suggest, Walt?” asked Sears.
“I suggest a sub rosa stop someplace where we can have a quiet talk. Ah, do you know Humphrey’s Place, just inside the town limits on the Seven Mile Road?”
“I believe I’ve seen it.”
“I sorta use their back room as an office when I’ve got confidential business. What say we meet there?”
“If you insist,” Sears said, not bothering to consult Ricky.
They followed Hardesty’s car back to town, going a little faster than they had on the way out. The recognition between them—that each knew the frightening thing Elmer Scales had seen—made speech impossible. When Sears finally spoke, it was on an apparently neutral topic. “Hardesty’s an incompetent fool. ‘Confidential business.’ His only confidential business is with a bottle of Jim Beam.”
“Well, now we know what he does in the afternoons.” Ricky turned off the highway onto the Seven Mile Road. The tavern, the only building in sight, was a gray collection of angles and points two hundred yards down on the right.
“Indeed. He blots up free liquor in Humphrey Stalladge’s back room. He’d be better off in a shoe factory in Endicott.”
“What do you think this conversation will be about?”
“We’ll know all too soon. Here’s our rendezvous.”
Hardesty was already standing beside his car in the big, now nearly empty parking lot. Humphrey’s Place, in fact no more than an ordinary roadside tavern, had a long peaked and gabled facade with two large black windows: in one of these neon spelled out its name; in the other Utica Club flashed on and off. Ricky pulled in beside the sheriff’s car, and the two lawyers got out into the cold wind.
“Just follow me,” Hardesty said on a rising curve of intonation, his voice inflated with false bonhomie. After looking at one another with shared discomfort, they went up the concrete steps after him. Ricky sneezed twice, hard, the moment he was inside the tavern.
Omar Norris, one of the town’s small population of full-time drinkers, was seated on a stool at the bar, looking at them in amazement; plump Humphrey Stalladge moved between the booths, dusting ashtrays. “Walt!” he called, and then nodded at Ricky and Sears. Hardesty’s bearing had changed: within the bar, he was taller, more signeurial, and his physical attitude to the two older men behind him somehow suggested that they had come to the place for his advice. Then Stalladge glanced more closely at Ricky and said, “Mr. Hawthorne, isn’t it?” and smiled and said, “Well,” and Ricky knew that Stella had been in here at one time or another.
“Back room okay?” Hardesty asked.
“Always is, for you.” Stalladge waved toward a door marked Private, tucked in a corner beside the long bar, and watched the three men across the dusty floor. Omar Norris, still astonished, watched them, Hardesty striding like a G-man, Ricky conspicuous only in his sober neatness, Sears an imposing presence similar to (it only now came to Ricky) Orson Welles. “You’re in good company today, Walt,” Stalladge called behind their backs, and Sears made one of his disgusted noises deep in his throat—as much at that as at the negligent wave of his gloved hand with which Hardesty acknowledged the remark. Hardesty, princely, opened the door.
But once inside, after indicating that they should go down the dim hallway to the dark room at its end, his shoulders slumped again, his face relaxed, and he said, “Can I get you anything?” Both men shook their heads.
“I’m a little thirsty, myself,” Hardesty said, grimaced, and went back through the door.
Wordlessly the two lawyers went down the hall and into the dingy back room. A table, scarred by a thousand generations of cigarettes, stood in the center; six camp chairs circled it. Ricky found the light switch and flicked it down. Between the unseen light bulbs and the table stood cases of beer stacked nearly to the ceiling. The entire room smelled of smoke and stale beer; even with the light on, the front portion of the room was nearly as dark as it had been before.
“What are we doing here?” Ricky asked.
Sears sat heavily in one of the camp chairs, sighed, removed his hat and put it carefully on the table. “If you mean what will come of this fantastic excursion, nothing, Ricky, nothing.”
“Sears,” Ricky began, “I think we ought to talk about what Elmer saw out there.”
“Not in front of Hardesty.”
“I agree. Now.”
“Not now. Please.”
“My feet are still cold,” Ricky said, and Sears gave him a rare smile.
They heard the door at the end of the hall sliding open. Hardesty came in, a full glass of beer in one hand and a half-empty bottle of Labatt’s and his Stetson in the other. His complexion had become slightly reddened, as if by a rough plains wind. “Beer’s the best thing for a dry throat,” he said. Beneath the camouflaging mist of beer which floated out with his words was the sharper, darker tang of sour-mash whiskey. “Really wets the pipes.” Ricky calculated that Hardesty had managed to swallow one shot of whiskey and half a bottle of beer in the few moments he had been in the bar. “Have you two ever been here before?”
“No,” Sears said.
“Well, this is a good place. It’s real private, Humphrey makes sure you’re not disturbed if you got something private you want to say, and it’s kind of out of the way, so nobody is likely to see the sheriff and the two most distinguished lawyers in town sneakin’ into a tavern.”
“Nobody except Omar Norris.”
“Right, and he’s not likely to remember.” Hardesty swung a leg over a chair as if it were a large dog he intended to ride, lowered himself into it and simultaneously tossed his hat onto the table, where it bumped into Sears’s. Then the Labatt’s bottle went onto the table; Sears moved his own hat a few inches nearer his belly as the sheriff took a long swallow from his glass.
“If I may repeat a question my partner just asked, what are we doing here?”
“Mr. James, I want to tell you something.” The gunfighter eyes had a drunk’s shining sincerity. “You’ll understand why we had to get away from Elmer. We’re never gonna find who or what killed those sheep.” He swallowed again; stifled a burp with the back of his hand.
“No?” At least Hardesty’s awful performance was taking Sears’s mind off his own troubles; he was miming surprise and interest.
“No. No way, no how. This ain’t the first time something like this happened.”
“It isn’t?” Ricky brought out. He too sat down, wondering how much livestock had been slaughtered around Milburn without his hearing of it.
“Not by a long shot. Not here, see, but in other parts of the country.”
“Oh,” Ricky leaned back against the rickety chair.
“You remember a few years back I went to a national police convention in Kansas City. Flew out, stayed there a week. Real good trip.” Ricky could remember this, because after Hardesty’s return the sheriff had spoken to the Lion’s Club, the Kiwanis, the Rotary, the Jaycees and the Elks, the National Rifle Association, the Masons and the John Birch Society, the VFW and the Companions of the Forest of America—the organizations which had paid for his trip, and to a third of which Ricky by obligation belonged. His topic was the need for “a modern and fully equipped force for law and order in the small American community.”
“Well,” Hardesty said, gripping the beer bottle in one hand like a hot dog, “one night back at the motel, I got talking to a bunch of local sheriffs. These guys were from Kansas and Missouri and Minnesota. You know. They were talking about just this kind of setup —funny kinds of unsolved crimes. Now my point is this. At least two or three of these guys ran into exactly the same thing we saw today. Bunch of animals lying dead in a field—wham, bam, dead overnight. No cause until you look at ’em and find—you know. Real neat wounds, like a surgeon would do. And no blood. Exsanguinated, they call that. One of these guys said there was a whole wave of this in the Ohio River valley in the late sixties. Horses, dogs, cows—we probably got the first sheep. But, Mr. Hawthorne, you brought it all back to me when you said that about the no blood. That’s right, that reminded me. You’d figure those sheep would bleed like crazy. And in Kansas City, the same thing happened just a year back before the conference, around Christmas.”
“Nonsense,” said Sears. “I’m not going to listen to any more of this rubbish.”
“Excuse me, Mr. James. It’s not nonsense. It all happened. You could look it up in the Kansas City Times. December 1973. Buncha dead cattle, no footprints, no blood—and that was on fresh snow too, just like today.” He looked across at Ricky, winked, drained his beer.
“Nobody was ever arrested?” Ricky asked.
“Never. In all of those places, they never found anybody. Just like somethin’ bad came to town, put on its show and took off again. My idea is that things like this are somethin’s idea of a joke.”
“What?” Sears said explosively. “Vampires? Demons? Crazy.”
“No, I’m not sayin’ that. Hell, I know there’s no vampires, just like I know that damned monster in that lake in Scotland isn’t there.” Hardesty tipped back in his chair and locked his hands behind his head. “But nobody ever found anything, and we ain’t gonna either. There isn’t even any sense in looking. I figure just to keep Elmer happy by telling him how I’m workin’ on it.”
“Is that really all you intend to do?” asked incredulous Ricky Hawthorne.
“Oh, I might have a man walk around some of the local farms, ask if they saw anything funny last night, but that’s about all.”
“And you actually brought us here to tell us that?” Sears asked.
“I actually did.”
“Let’s go, Ricky.” Sears pushed his chair back and reached for his hat.
“And actually I thought the two most distinguished lawyers in town might be able to tell me something.”
“I could, but I doubt that you’d listen.”
“A little less high and mighty, Mr. James. We’re both on the same side, aren’t we?”
Ricky said, over the inevitable phht of expelled air from Sears, “What did you think we could tell you?”
“Why you think you know something about what Elmer saw last night.” He fingered a groove in his forehead, smiling. “You two old boys went into deep freeze when Elmer was talking about that. So you know something or heard something or saw something you didn’t want to tell Elmer Scales. Well, suppose you support your local sheriff and speak up.”
Sears pushed himself up from the chair. “I saw four dead sheep. I know nothing. And that, Walter, is that.” He snatched his hat from the table. “Ricky, let’s go do something useful.”