The Big Dark Sky (46)
“You and I . . . we’re different,” he said. “Whatever there might be between us, the rules don’t apply.”
Her smile was still lovely but melancholy now. “I feel the same. It’s good to know you dream of me. Let’s get together soon.”
“We will,” Ganesh said. “When this is done, and if we all survive it, we’ll get together.”
The screen went dark.
Ganesh returned to the elevator, rode up to the main floor, passed through the security vestibule, and returned to his SUV in the parking lot.
The day was warm. He started the engine and turned up the air conditioner.
He sat behind the wheel, staring through the windshield at the warehouse that wasn’t a warehouse, thinking about Artimis Selene.
If he was not always ebullient, as she had said, he was with rare exception a happy optimist. Now a terrible sadness came upon him, a twilight of the soul here in the morning sun. Sorrow might have grown into depression if he had been a less positive person, but his lifelong experience was that every spell of darkness lifted soon enough, so that light came again into the soul and mind and heart, which were not made for darkness.
37
As morning becomes afternoon, the angled sunlight imparts some dimension to the ghost town, an illusion of vitality. Asher Optime’s shadow returns and gradually elongates as he strips off Dr. Steve Fielding’s backpack, empties the historian’s pockets, and carries everything into the saloon.
Although he prefers to kill his captives in the church, so that it’s then easy to tumble the dead down the stairs into the basement, Asher is prepared to transport a corpse the length of town with a minimum of effort. From the saloon, he retrieves a sturdy, formed-plastic pallet on wheels, with a four-foot handle. The bed of the pallet is six feet long and three wide. He loads the historian onto it and secures the cargo with two bungee cords that clip to rings in the perimeter of the conveyance.
Weeks earlier, it occurred to him that an occasion might arise when he would have a captive or more than one locked away in the church, their terror maturing into the collapse of hope that he wished to see before executing them—when suddenly he would find himself with a fresh corpse on his hands. Conveying such a bundle into the testamentary necropolis under the church would then become a logistical problem. He, of course, has solved it.
He takes satisfaction from his thoughtful preparations for this mission and his practicality. He would have been a most meticulous surgeon if he had followed the family tradition, though saving human lives is an evil that he’s not capable of committing.
As Asher pulls the inelegant hearse along the runneled hardpan of Zipporah’s only street, crows circle overhead, shrieking as if singing a dirge for the deceased, though their cries are in fact a celebration of carrion. They aren’t bold enough to dare Asher and settle on the corpse in motion, though he would not chase them away. As a devoted student of Xanthus Toller and a valiant soldier in the Restoration Movement, Asher is at peace with all the many conscious creatures of the planet—animal, vegetable, mineral—except for his own kind. He is pleased to think that following his death, carrion eaters will feast on his flesh, though he must be careful not to die among cannibals and, by being eaten, sustain a human life.
On the west side of the church, as on the east side, one window near ground level serves the basement. At one time, these panes brought light into that low space. The glass has long ago shattered, and recently Asher has replaced it with inch-thick plywood screwed into place from the exterior.
Two latches secure the hinged window to the casing. He releases them and swings it out of the way. The opening is three feet wide and twenty inches high, sufficient to receive most cadavers, though it is not the route by which he could insert an obese person into his collection.
Asher disconnects the bungee cords and rolls the corpse off the pallet. With an effort that causes a thin sweat to slick his brow, he shoves the late historian through the window as if forcing a thick, padded envelope through a mail slot.
The dead man splashes into the trapped storm runoff that is about two feet deep in the church basement. There he will decompose among the others who float in those dark, fetid waters like former passengers who fell overboard from Death’s gondola during a transit of the River Styx.
Asher inhales the miasma that rises out of the open window. Although many would consider it a stench, he savors it as evidence of progress toward the implementation of the philosophy that he is so brilliantly explicating in the pages of his historic manifesto. This is a fragrance, not a stink, the sweet perfume that will mantle the world during its transition from human domination to human absence.
38
Ophelia Poole was huddled with Colson Fielding in the influx of pale light where the roof of the add-on sacristy met the back wall of the church, when a noise alerted her to the possibility that the maniac, Optime, might be returning. She stepped out of the sacristy into the dark sanctuary as something splashed in the catacombs that lay under the plank floor. Disturbed water sloshed back and forth against the stone walls of the basement, raising in her mind’s eye macabre images of ghastly swimmers seeking a way out of their dismal tarn. Something thumped against the farther wall of the building. A few lesser noises followed. The agitated water subsided, and quiet settled on the church once more.
When it seemed that a visit from their jailer wasn’t impending, she returned to the boy. Brow furrowed as though he was desperately calculating, Colson stared at the swath of sky revealed by the narrow gap in the roof. He was a cute kid with tousled dark hair. Ophelia wished he were taller, more muscular, with something of the street about him. She pitied him for what he’d already endured, but she was grateful that she didn’t any longer have to face alone what might be coming.