Phantom Nights Read online

  PHANTOM NIGHTS

  John Farris

  Digital Edition published by Crossroad Press

  © 2010 / Penny Dreadful, LLC

  Copy-edited by: David Dodd

  Cover Design By: David Dodd

  Cover images courtesy of:

  www.obsidiandawn.com

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  LICENSE NOTES

  This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each person you share it with. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then you should return to the vendor of your choice and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

  Meet the Author

  John Lee Farris (born 1936) is an American writer, known largely for his work in the southern Gothic genre. He was born 1936 in Jefferson City, Missouri, to parents John Linder Farris (1909–1982) and Eleanor Carter Farris (1905–1984). Raised in Tennessee, he graduated from Central High School in Memphis and attended Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis . His first wife, Kathleen, was the mother of Julie Marie, John, and Jeff Farris; his second wife, Mary Ann Pasante, was the mother of Peter John ("P.J.") Farris.

  Apart from his vast body of fiction, his work on motion picture screenplays includes adaptations of his own books (i.e., The Fury), original scripts, and adaptations of the works of others (such as Alfred Bester's The Demolished Man). He wrote and directed the film Dear Dead Delilah in 1973. He has had several plays produced off-Broadway, and also paints and writes poetry. At various times he has made his home in New York, southern California and Puerto Rico; he now lives near Atlanta, Georgia.Book List

  Author's Website – Furies & Fiends

  Other John Farris books currently available or coming soon from Crossroad Press:

  All Heads Turn When the Hunt Goes By

  Catacombs

  Dragonfly

  Fiends

  King Windom

  Minotaur

  Nightfall

  Sacrifice

  Sharp Practice

  Shatter

  Solar Eclipse

  Son of the Endless Night

  Soon She Will Be Gone

  The Axeman Cometh

  The Captors

  The Fury

  The Fury and the Power

  The Fury and the Terror

  The Ransome Women

  Unearthly (formerly titled The Unwanted)

  When Michael Calls

  Wildwood

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  Author's Note

  The italicized part of Ramses Valjean's lament is from a fellow sufferer named Lionel Johnson in his The Precept of Silence.

  In a dark time,

  the eye begins to see.

  —THEODORE ROETHKE

  ONE

  Homecoming

  Bad Blood

  Death and the Dixie Traveler

  When Leland Howard got out of his car in front of the homestead, he saw his half-brother, Saxby, and sister-in-law, Rose Heidi, on the front porch, either just arrived or about to depart; he wasn't sure which. At any rate Saxby had got there first.

  Figures, Leland thought. He'd had a deal of driving to do, Sax, all the way from Elizabethton. The Tri-Cities area, where Sax had his dealerships: Chevrolets and Case farm equipment.

  July 30 and not a breath of air stirring. Not much rain in West Tennessee for a month, six weeks probably. But the deep front lawn and flowerbeds behind a white wrought-iron fence looked freshly watered. Magnolia and gingko leaves glossy as wrapped Christmas candy. There were artesian wells on the six-acre property, four blocks west of the courthouse square and midway down a wide street of mostly antebellum homes, some of which stood long unclaimed in the sun, suffering stupors of dry-rot.

  Leland took off a cocoa-colored Panama hat and mopped his forehead while his man, Jim Giles, parked the Pontiac Eight in the shade of a monster cedar across the street. Got out and leaned against a high fender of the Pontiac. He was a lanky man, country-saturnine, simian hang to his arms, outsized hands, wearing a shiny blue suit a size too small for him. The suit spoke of a lifetime of meager gleanings, of hand-me-downs and thrift-store racks. Giles looked middling poor, but not servile.

  Leland lingered on the sidewalk with a certain aplomb that had always come naturally to him, drawing everyone's attention up there on the shady porch. No hearse in sight, but one might be parked round back to spare the family's sensibilities. Doc Hogarth taking his ease in one of the chain-hung gliders, drinking lemonade, as was Rose Heidi beside him. She looked to be about seven months gone this time, setting herself down at every opportunity. They'd hauled along the children, all dressed up, so no fooling: Priest Howard's low state of health finally could be terminal, after all of the false alarms Leland often had not bothered to respond to.

  The two kids around Rose Heidi were bored and acting up. A third boy, Sax's oldest, was off by himself reading a Batman comic book. Burnell the houseman hovered just behind the screen door and threshold he had never crossed in twenty-six years. One of those nigras every family of means had, been around so long he had a certain proud status in both of Evening Shade's communities, white and colored.

  Spare me, Jesus. Leland put his hat on and walked through the open gate, up the brick walk to the three-story Classic Revival house, his boyhood home. Gold toothpick in a corner of his mouth. Seersucker suit looking a little wilted this time of day. There was a ruptured duck in the buttonhole of his right lapel. Couldn't remind the voters of Tennessee often enough that he'd served his country well, shrapnel in his back to prove it. War wounds always a good subject of conversation at the VFW.

  Half-brother Saxby coming down the steps to meet him part way. Sax had four-effed it during the last great world conflict, flat feet and nearly blind in his right eye. His face in the late afternoon sun was florid, overfed. And he'd developed a wheeze.

  "Didn't know how quick you could make it, Lee; said they hadn't seen you up at the farm in a while. On the stump around Union City, your campaign people told me."

  "That was seven-thirty this morning. Then I stopped in Dyersburg for a Rotary lunch, drove on down to Memphis pay a courtesy call on Boss Cramp. Which is where the sad news caught up to me, Sax; in the lobby of the Peabody."

  Saxby offered to shake hands. Leland kept his hands hard and callused. Chopping wood was good exercise, another benefit. The farmers whose votes mattered to him as much as Boss Crump's captive wards in Memphis disliked politicians with pampered palms "slick as snot on a doorknob," a saying Leland recalled from his youth. That was what Sax's hand felt like, manicures a ritual along with his weekly hair trim.

  "Boss Crump! I'll bet you snuck his endorsement right out from under Walker Wellford's nose."

  "No way to carry West Tennessee without the Boss," Leland said comfortably.

  "You know I been keeping my ear to the ground, but it looks too close to call in my neck of the woods without the Knoxville Sentinel on your bandwagon."

  "Expect I'll get their endor
sement next week. And I surely do appreciate how you've been busting your hump for me in the Tri-Cities."

  Saxby's customary smile resembled a wince. He stared past Leland at Jim Giles, leaning against the Pontiac.

  "Still having convicts drive you around?"

  "Parolees. It's in my nature to forgive another man's transgressions. The preachers and the church ladies go for that."

  "What's that one there paroled from?"

  "Manslaughter. Twenty years, mandatory eight."

  "He killed somebody?"

  Leland couldn't resist. "Bare-handed. But James is a gentle soul. Just on occasion takes a deep disliking to one fella or another."

  Leland looked up at the second-story windows, drapes partly drawn, of the large northwest-corner bedroom. Pyracantha hugged the wall up to the windowsills. Partly drawn? Old Doc Hogarth sitting outside right now with his raspberry lemonade the color of weak blood and a paper fan in his other hand, courtesy of Malfitano's Quality Furniture on the Square. Nothing left for Doc to do but pronounce Priest Howard dead; a job of comfortable waiting, no doubt.

  "Guess I'm not too late, the look of things."

  Sax glanced where Leland's attention was focused. "I thought it was all over for sure about two-thirty; then he opened his eyes and even said a couple of words. It's like he's hangin' on for your sake, Leland."

  Leland's lip curled. "Same old song and dance. Hour from now he's sitting up eating a good supper."

  "Catch sight of him and you won't be sayin' that. Any breath might be his last. I stayed with him for an hour and a half, just walked outside when you showed up. Had to give myself a short break, use the—" Sax allowed himself to choke up.

  "Dying can be a hard business. Who's up there with him now?"

  "Mally Shaw."

  "For a fact? Thought Mally went off to Nashville to live with her Daddy after William blew his brains out."

  "She did, and studied nursing. Came home again; it's been eight months, she said. And from what Burnell tells us, Mally has been a pillar of strength for Daddy."

  Saxby's youngest boy was surreptitiously torturing his sister; the little girl wailed. Sax said sharply, "Rose Heidi, do somethin' about those chirrun."

  "Well, they are just awfully hot, Sax. They want to watch television inside. It's almost time for Howdy Doody."

  "Not with my Daddy bein' called home this very instant. Have some sense." To Leland Sax said, "I'll just go on back up there with you. Maybe if he hasn't drifted off too far you could tell Daddy the good news about Boss Crump. Much as he's always had a deep regard for that old sumbitch."

  Leland nodded. From a coat pocket he fished out the little sack of hard candies he always had with him on the campaign trail and handed some out to the kids who clamored around him. He took off his hat again to Doc Hogarth and Rose Heidi. A ceiling fan on the porch ruffled his wavy blond hair.

  "So pleased to see you again," Rose Heidi said with the minimal amount of enthusiasm she thought she could get away with. Whisking a wad of scented handkerchief through the blue-moon hollows of her dark belligerent eyes. "Hasn't it been such a long time, though?" She had been born accusing the world of a vague something, Leland thought; and all of the world's deeply flawed—by her lights—inhabitants.

  The little girl, whose name Leland couldn't remember, sprawled half in her mother's lap, inviting another pinch in her behind from the troublemaking brother, who danced away from the glider with a smirk.

  "Joe Dean, you keep it up and there will be a switchin' in your immediate future," Rose Heidi said.

  Leland turned his attention elsewhere.

  "Doc."

  "Leland?" Nod. "You're looking fit."

  Leland nodded back proudly; a man whose ego was always on the lookout for a stray stroking, like a cat passing through a crowded room. He glanced at Saxby, who obviously despised what he considered to be a subtle reference to his own girth.

  "Believe me," Sax said to Leland when they were walking up the curved stairway inside, "I have tried every diet known to man, and I can't lose an ounce." Wheeze. "What's your secret?" This with a sidelong glance. In spite of a forced smile his eyes, like bees in a violated hive, were busily angry.

  Light passing through a stained-glass window above the front door made a rainbow splash on the gloomy brown wallpaper, illuminating the depressions in the wall on either side of Sax's boyhood room where Leland had on occasion pounded Sax's head.

  "My mother," Leland said, "was trim as a willow sapling. Could have something to do with it. How much exercise do you get, Sax? I don't count fucking Rose Heidi. My guess is she does most of the work anyhow."

  Silence as they walked toward their father's room.

  "Trust you to come up with a trashy remark," Sax said dourly as they paused at the door.

  "Sax?"

  "What?"

  "Just wait out here in the hall while I say my fond farewell." Sax hunched his shoulders grudgingly. Leland said with a slight smile, "Our Daddy's not going to have a deathbed change of heart and turn loose a single dime has my name on it."

  Snuffle. For God's sake, Leland thought, the old days flashing through his brain. Sax still snuffled like a little kid.

  "None of us can be sure what is in Daddy's heart at this fateful hour. You may be underestimatin' his capacity for forgiveness."

  "I seriously doubt it," Leland said, his smile wise and cold. They heard a car with poor brakes outside, then voices of newcomers. "More company to grieve with us?" Leland said. "How many did you invite, Sax?"

  "That would be Pastor McClure and his wife." He turned and went back along the squeaky hall to the stairs, saying "Hope you choke on that toothpick." Leland allowed Sax's mood and attitude a few moments' study, then gave an exaggerated snuffle and nose-wipe that Sax had to hear. Just to remind him who had taken charge early in their relationship and was still on top. Childish of him, but how satisfying.

  Mally Shaw looked up when Leland entered his father's bedroom. She was sitting in a rocker near the old man, a Bible open in her lap. The Howard family Bible, no less. Ponderous to hold, the pages fragile as moths' wings from age. He caught a little of what she was reading aloud as he opened the door. Psalms.

  "Go on, Mally," Leland said.

  Instead she placed a bookmark in the Bible, closed it, glanced at Priest Howard's face elevated on pillows, and stood.

  "Appears that I'm in time," Leland said.

  "Praise be, Mr. Leland," Mally said, and she put the Bible on a stand near the bed, where diffused sunlight brought out what was left of the gold stamping on the leather cover, darkened by the oils from countless fingers over a century and a half.

  Leland admired the profile Mally presented against that same light. She would be, he guessed, four or five years younger than he was. Even a man who had no liking for dark meat—never one of Leland's prejudices since he'd been old enough to take up the chase—couldn't fail to be attracted to such a comely woman. It was obvious that more than one white man had temporarily roosted in the family tree, going back at least a hundred years.

  Leland approached his father's massive and ugly old mahogany bedstead. Initial shock at how desiccated the old man looked, this bone-sack, toothless, eyes agley, caved face the color of a harvest moon. The old enchantment ebbing, its nucleus deveined. He was taking fluids and holding at his low level on morphine. Nothing left of him to dread or despise, this relic who in his prime could change the weather with his scowl. Leland wasn't at all sure in the eclipselike pallor of the sickroom that Priest Howard was still drawing breath. Still, Leland felt uneasy. Then he saw the dying man's chest rise convulsively and fall again beneath tangled fingers, the flickering of lashless eyelids.

  "Who's there?" Priest Howard said, voice phlegmy but surprisingly strong.

  "It's Leland, Daddy. How you feeling today?"

  "I've seen . . . the Light."

  "How's that, Daddy?"

  "There's . . . shadows in the Light. They're . . . waitin' on me.
"

  Leland, perplexed, looked across the bed at Mally, who was smiling sympathetically down at the old man.

  "Hasn't said that much in two days."

  There were bad odors in the room, among them human flesh on its way to the grave; and something good, refreshing: the mild appealing scent Mally wore.

  "What light does he mean?" Leland said with a slight, unexpected shudder.

  "I don't know. First time he's spoken of it, Mr. Leland." Her face calm, but her lower lip folding between white teeth.

  Priest Howard's veiny eyelids trembled again. His head moved fractionally on the pillows.

  "Come closer . . . Lee. See you."

  Leland took the toothpick from his mouth and popped in a piece of candy to suck on before he approached the bed. There were a few chick-feather remnants of hair clinging to his father's long, runneled skull. No further movement. Leland bent over the old man, growing tense, thinking he'd heard that telltale death rattle in the throat. Eyes flicking to Mally, who was frowning as if she'd heard it too. Then his father breathed again.

  "Mally. Oxygen."

  There was a tank beside the bed. Mally placed the mask over Priest Howard's mouth and nose, opened a valve on the tank. Leland liked the compassion he saw in her eyes. Totally absorbed, the ministering angel. She had fingertips on the pulse in one of the old man's thin wrists.

  Half a minute passed; she removed the mask.

  "Can't give him all he wants," Mally explained. "Enough so his lungs stop reaching, hard on his heart." She picked up a moist sponge and gently wiped it across the dying man's forehead.

  Leland motioned her back and leaned over his father, who apparently had been restored to the point of being able to keep his eyes open. Pale, pale blue beneath an overgrowth of wilderness eyebrows.