Son of the Endless Night, page 32
She was in the sunup line of the cafeteria at Galeatry Lodge, three quarters of a mile down the mountain from Davos Chalet. No one was with her. For breakfast she was having grapefruit, coffee, and a box of 40% Bran Flakes. She was strikingly tall and dressed all in black, ski clothing that modeled to perfection the figure of a showgirl or a very expensive hooker. Her skin was stained the even dark shade of wild honey. Even from where he stood it was obvious she was no kid: she might be as old as forty. Stemmons had always favored older women for sexual liaisons, which was one reason he was immediately attracted to her. The other reason was— perhaps— the little savage arc of scar low on her left cheek, near her mouth, as if a sensual kiss by a tormented lover had slipped, and bitten deep. The gash of love. She had the ease, the contented expression of money, status, accomplishment.
Out of his league, of course. But then she turned at the register and looked his way. Her eyes were obsidian, they jumped out of her face at him like knives and he felt that curious lift and sizzle of nerves along the spinal column, the sensation of destinies commingled.
Once he had selected his own breakfast Stemmons took his time looking around the big noisy cafeteria to see where she was seated. He was surprised, and disgruntled, not to find her anywhere in the room. A very fast eater. He wondered if she could ski.
She was a superb skier, as he found out early in the week. She was just ahead of him again, this time on the double chair lift; he followed her to High Hazard Two and probably could have caught up to her at the lip of the descent except for a problem with a binding that cost him several minutes. He could only watch as, unaccompanied, she swooped through sets of beautifully precise turns, the technique of an old master like Stein Erickson, leaving a shimmering snow wake in the halcyon air. Later that same day he had a glimpse of her from the heights of a chair lift pier; this time she was on the Devil's Pigtail, a fleet inky shadow, lost to her hips in the spuming powder, so lazily graceful as she laid into her turns that he ached to be there, complementing with his own crisp style her fluid descent, her airy excellence.
Suddenly he was spotting her everywhere on the slopes, but always she was maddeningly distant; he began to keep a mental diary of all of his glimpses of her, trying to figure out a pattern to her day so that he might intercept her. But she had no routine, she was consistent only in her elusiveness. One night, while he was hard at work pumping beer, he looked up to see her face in the glaring doorway of the tavern, turned toward him. He thought he saw her smile, and for a few moments it seemed as if she might come in, but then beer foamed over his wrist and when he looked for her again she wasn't there. He felt a sense of loss that had him in profane bad humor the rest of the night.
The week went by too quickly, and on Friday morning he didn't see her at all. Disappointed, he gave up his by now habitual scanning of the trails as he rose and fell, rose and fell, while the sun circled blindingly in flawless blue. Stemmons skied to classical music, a cassette player clipped to his jacket, small headphones clamped beneath his knit cap. For the lilting turns and cloud-filled plateaus of the High Hazards he liked Tchaikovsky or Mozart; Beethoven and Wagner suited the thundering express of the Rocket. Brahms soothed the lengthy jolting returns up the mountain.
The setting sun found him on the double chair lift rising once more to the summit where the several trails began and diverged, lacing down all sides of the mountain. Most of the ski crowd had packed it in for the day, and only a few of the chairs were occupied. The lift would cease operating, except for the ski patrol, at sunset. Probably ten minutes away. He would take the last long glide down in purpling dusk, through coves and tunnels formed from snowladen birches, the last rays of the sun flashing across his bronze goggles.
When he arrived at the lift ramp nearly four thousand feet above the darkened valley he lingered for a couple of minutes until the lift quit, waiting for the handful of skiers who had come up behind him to push off. Then he slid down the ramp and struck off down a packed, somewhat corny vale toward the most difficult of the mountain's runs, the Devil's Pigtail. It was marked with a sign that featured an impish caricature of a porker looking back over one shoulder at his corkscrew tail. WARNING: FOR EXPERT SKIERS ONLY. The horned pig was pointing to the left, to a cove still golden with the long light of the sun.
And he saw her, poised against a flushed violet sky, goggles raised on her high forehead. She heard his skis rattling down the trail and looked around inquiringly. He held his breath, sure that she was going to disappear before he could sideslip down to where she waited. But she smiled, and made no move. Stemmons couldn't believe his luck had turned at last.
"Hi," he said, coasting past her and executing a little jump-turn that placed him facing her and directly in front of the precipitous trail.
"Hello." Dimples, and those great, somewhat mocking eyes, and that alluring scar. She was wearing a pink joke button on her black partially zipped windbreaker. In white lettering it said THERE ARE MANY WAYS TO SAY I LOVE YOU. FUCKING IS THE FASTEST. Her smile widened when she caught him gawking at it. A rising wind spilled snow from the tip of a looming evergreen. Particles glittered, with a charged, fabulous light, in her hair, across the top of her forehead.
"I've been watching you ski this week," Stemmons told her. "You're good."
"I'm very good," she said, gently correcting him. "So are you. You're Donald Stemmons, aren't you?"
"That's right."
"And you were on the U.S. ski team two years ago?"
"No. Wish I could say I was. My best shot was a little too slow."
"Planning to try again?"
"I just ski for fun now. You up here on vacation?"
"You might call it a working vacation."
"Oh." He wasn't quite sure what to make of that. "How long will you be around?"
"Well, that depends."
"Maybe we could have dinner."
"That depends as well."
"On what?"
"Men have to earn me, Donald," she said, even more gently than before, and with a slight wistfulness, as if she had already decided he couldn't measure up.
He might have guessed. A hooker. So much for his luck. He had a trade-off coming at the Hickory Pit, steaks for two, but no money to pay for ass, even this choice piece.
"No," she said, more boldly. "I'm not a whore."
"Well, uh— "
"Dinner's on me. Provided."
"What?"
"We race to the bottom."
"And if I win, dinner's on you?"
"That's right."
"What if I lose?" He couldn't help smiling.
She cocked her head, considering the other side of the wager. "Dinner's still on me. But you do the dishes."
"At your place?"
"At my place."
"Sounds good to me. But in all fairness, you ought to have a head start." He nodded toward the trail. "I've been skiing up here since December."
"That's very generous of you, Donald. How much of a head start will you give me?"
"Fifteen seconds?"
"Oh, you must be fast. This'll be exciting. Well, it looks as if we're about to lose the light. Ready?"
Stemmons dug in his poles and jumped a full turn, sidestepped out of her way. She brushed past him lightly without another word and swooped on down the trail, which already was becoming a little vague in the declining light. He waited, counting half aloud as she described a series of balletic turns that carried her beyond a thick patch of woods and out of sight. She was moving very fast and he bit his tongue in his desire to overhaul her, but was faithful to the count. At fifteen he jabbed his poles deep and lifted off, hurtled through isolated stands of birches and around a broad mogul, establishing an instant almost effortless rhythm across slopes still mildly streaked with sun.
It occurred to Stemmons, belatedly, that he hadn't learned her name. He knew the trail so well he could have skied it by moonlight, and he knew where she would make the mistakes that would enable him to catch up. He just hoped she wouldn't spill. That would take the fun out of it.
When he cleared the woods and turned sharply right for the second stage of the now steeply plunging trail he didn't see her anywhere below him: the trail, in a thin reddish glow, was starkly empty, and he could see almost three hundred yards ahead. He pulled up quickly, astonished, looked past some big rocks and darkly banded trees, afraid that she had overshot this turn and gone pinwheeling into a shadowy pileup.
His spurted breath, frozen, drifted briskly away on the wind. He heard, but couldn't see, some distant ski patrollers. He cupped his gloved hands to his mouth to call out to her. But what was her name?
He wondered then if she had skied just to the woods and decided not to go on. She might be hiding in there, with that smile. Having decided, capriciously, that he wasn't worth her time after all. Nothing but a tease. Suddenly he was angry. The cunt. He regretted all the time he'd spent speculating about her, the rush of lust he'd experienced a minute ago, gazing into her wide-set eyes, dark as old brandy, subtly fuming. There are many ways to say I love you. . . .
Well, go fuck yourself tonight, lady. I don't want to play anymore.
Stemmons pushed off again, slicing down a narrow chute that was a little too icy for his liking, growing more dangerous as night came on and the temperature dropped. He made a left-hand turn and came out onto a narrow plateau, almost flat and devoid of growth, crusty moguls projecting from the ridgeback above him.
That's when he saw her again, far down the trail, a dim figure in the dusk. She was standing with hands on hips, her ski poles at angles of forty-five degrees, looking back the way she had come. Looking for him. Head held at a taunting angle.
He couldn't believe, despite the start he'd given her, his brief reconnoitering pause above, that she had covered so much of the trail so quickly. He hesitated for only a moment, then thrust himself forward savagely and went into a racing crouch as he hurtled on rattling skis down the troughlike trail.
The woman crouched, too, though she was still facing him. She jabbed her poles into the snow and lunged forward.
Uphill.
She was skiing uphill, flying toward him with the same reckless speed he had achieved.
For several seconds Stemmons's mind simply refused to believe what his eyes recorded. It was a physical impossibility. Yet here she came, all in black, the pink joke button glowing on one breast like a diminutive, romantic sun, eyes hidden behind dark goggles, the pale lip of scar somehow frightfully vivid despite the distance between them. At this velocity they would collide in seconds, nowhere to go but off the trail into rock after rock after rock. Men have to earn me, Donald. Her hair wisping like smoke, coiling in the air above her lowered head, her whole body now shimmering blackly, becoming amorphous even as her speed increased, and there was no stopping on this stiletto of ice-slick trail: nothing could stop him now short of a deliberate spill. He had seen racing friends rent from anus to navel by such spills, the bloody broken edges of ribcage and collarbones poking through pulverized flesh.
Donald Stemmons screamed; his skis left the track just as they met, soaringly, head-on. But it was not a fleshly woman he encountered, it was a whirling, seething, dense black cloud, a deeper blackness than anything he'd ever seen, even his own mother's shroud. The cloud drew him in and spun him around at breakneck speed, tearing the breath from his lungs and the skis from his boots before he was hurled nearly sixty feet down one side of the trail. In a splashing sunset moment he came down headfirst onto a thinly iced boulder with such force that every vertebra of his spinal column was crushed, his skull fragmented, his eyeballs ejected from their sockets. Most of his brains were pounded down into his mouth and throat.
Even before Donald Ray Stemmons died, the black cloud had begun to dissipate above the slick white surface of the Devil's Pigtail; streaks of it wafted toward the heights of flame-tipped trees and vanished, in pure thin darkening air, high above the summit of Hermitage Mountain.
55
For the entire week preceding the arraignment of Richard Devon, scheduled for the ninth of March, the prisoner's attitude and behavior were much improved. He spoke politely to his jailers, although no more than he had to. He asked for reading material and passed most of his time in his cell quietly absorbed in War and Peace and a life of Tolstoi. On two occasions he was allowed to watch television with other prisoners, although he had to wear his straitjacket.
Without restraint but with guards present he also had the opportunity to exercise. His appetite was good. He met once with Maggie Renquist and an associate of hers. He was cooperative but revealed nothing of his feelings when asked direct questions about the murder. Adam also met with the prisoner the day before the arraignment; he didn't know whether he was talking to the possessor or to the possessed.
On March 9 the prisoner, wearing a neat gray suit, figured blue tie, and black loafers with tassels, was taken in handcuffs to the courtroom of Judge Ralph D. McComb, where he stood silent and self-absorbed while his lawyer spoke for him, entering a plea of not guilty to the charge of first-degree murder.
Lindsay Potter saw him for the first time since the ordeal in the interview room almost a month before. As Adam was speaking, the prisoner turned his head to look at her; there was something boyish but cruel in the set of the mouth, a look of boredom in the eyes. This one look inspired in her such feelings of hopelessness, despair, and fear for her life that she had all she could do to keep from weeping. The surge of emotions passed, but she was left with a sense of bleakness that was worse than any depression she'd ever known.
"Rich is gone, isn't he?" she said afterwards to Adam. "It's as if this other— thing— just moved in, packed all of Rich up in a small suitcase, and stored him in the attic."
"Did you notice the way McComb kept looking at him? Nobody is more plodding, pedantic, and unimaginative than Ralph. But five minutes after they brought Rich into the courtroom he was so nervous I thought he was going to swallow his teeth. He must be happy he isn't presiding."
"You know what it all adds up to."
"Rich seems without conscience, totally indifferent. If he's like this when the trial begins I don't know how I'll be able to sell an insanity plea to the jury, with or without expert testimony."
"Then we have to try to sell the truth: it isn't Rich, it's— "
"Establishing 'truth' is incidental to the process of law," Adam reminded her. "A courtroom is a place to reach a decision through the adversarial system, which is not the same thing as separating the true from the false. I'm not a philosopher. I'm a trial lawyer. Forget it, Lindsay. There's not much I can do."
"Are you quitting?"
His hands shook and he spilled coffee on his sleeve. He scowled.
"I hate that word, Linds."
"If you can't— or won't— defend him properly, you might as well turn the case over to the public defender."
"No, I— we can always get delays. Keep working, and hope we don't lose any more of our key witnesses. You know I can't build a case for NGRI with depositions. I need the people on the stand, telling the jury what Rich was like when he killed Karyn."
"Adam, I just don't think you have a case for NGRI. But in spite of your objections, I know it may be possible to plead demonic possession."
"How? Look what happened in the Arne Cheyenne Johnson case."
"I read the transcript. I don't know who was more inept, the presiding judge or counsel for the defense."
"Sure, it was a botched trial, but what matters is, the judge refused to allow the defense attorney to present his argument, let alone call priests or other key witnesses. So Johnson's lawyer switched to a plea of self-defense on behalf of another. Which I hardly think will work in Rich's case."
"But demonic possession pleas have been successful in England. I've sent for transcripts of two of those trials. They should be here in a few days. At least look them over, Adam."
He studied her skeptically, and with concern. "You're really serious about this."
"Yes. Believe me, it's not what I want to do. I want to just turn my back on the case, forget I ever saw Richard Devon. And try to get over being as scared as I am. But I can't, Adam. I also want to be able to respect myself for the rest of my life."
"I don't want to be the first Kurland to disgrace himself before the bar of the state of Vermont."
"You're much too good a lawyer. All you need are the means, a way to make it work."
Adam made sure his hands were steady before he lifted his coffee cup again.
"I'll read those transcripts," he said. "Doesn't mean I'm committing myself, Lindsay." But she looked so grateful and newly determined that he had the feeling he had.
"I'll try to get hold of Father Merlo today, find out when he's coming back. And he needs to know about Donald Ray Stemmons."
"Why?"
"Oh, Adam. All those deaths." Lindsay started a shrug that turned into a shudder, then made herself look him in the eye. "You don't really believe they were accidents, do you? I don't. We need him here; we need his guidance and his prayers. Because— it could happen to us. Couldn't it?"
56
On an uncommonly mild end-of-winter day in Rome, Father James Merlo met with his immediate superior, the chief investigator for the office that dealt with exorcisms and the claims of demonic possession that were referred almost daily to the Vatican by priests around the world, and the cardinal in charge of the tribunal known as the Apostolic Penitentiary, in the cardinal's study high above the San Demaso courtyard. Luncheon was served. The windows were open to a vista of Renaissance domes and rooftops and cream yellow clouds, and the breeze was refreshing, with only a hint of the monoxide miasma that usually enshrouded the Eternal City.
