11

Some hours later on Christmas Eve, Walt Hardesty woke up in his office and noticed that the brim of his Stetson bore a new stain-he had knocked over a glass while sleeping at his desk, and the small amount of bourbon remaining in the glass had soaked into his hat. "Assholes," he pronounced, meaning the deputies, then remembered that the deputies had gone home hours before and would not return for two days. He uprighted the glass and blinked around him. The light in his untidy office hurt his eyes but seemed oddly pale-dim and somehow pinkish, as if on some early morning of a Kansas spring forty years before. Hardesty coughed and rubbed his eyes, feeling a little like that bozo in the old story who went to sleep one day and woke up with white hair and a long beard, about a hundred years older. "Rip van Shitstorm," he muttered, and worked for a while at clearing the phlegm from his throat. After that he tried to blot the hatbrim on his shirtsleeve, but the stain, though still damp, had set. He lifted the hat to his nose: County Fair. Well, what the hell, he thought, and sucked at the coffee-colored stain. Lint, dust a faint trace of bourbon came into his mouth along with the disagreeable flavor of wet felt.

Hardesty went to the sink in his office, rinsed out his mouth, and bent down to look into the mirror. There was Rip van Shitstorm indeed, the famous hat-sucker, a sight which gave him no pleasure, and he was about to turn away when he finally recorded that behind him and to his left, just visible over his shoulder, the door to the utility cells was open wide.

And that was impossible. He unlocked that door only when Leon Churchill or some other deputy brought in another body waiting to be shipped up to the county morgue-the last time it had been Penny Draeger, her long silky black hair fouled and matted with dirt and snow. Hardesty had lost track of time since the discovery of Jim Hardie's and Mrs. Barnes's bodies and the beginning of the heavy snow, but he thought that Penny Draeger must have come in at least two days ago-that door had stayed locked ever since. But now it was open-open to its fullest extent-as if one of the bodies back there had strolled out, seen him sleeping with his head on his cheek, and turned around to go back to its cell and its sheet.

He walked past the file cabinets and his battered desk to the door, swung it back and forth reflectively for a moment, and then went through to the corridor which led to the cells. Here stood a tall metal door which he had not touched since leaving the Draeger girl's body; and it too was unlocked.

"Jesus H. Christ," Hardesty said, for while the deputies had keys to the first door, only he had the key to this, and he had not even looked at the metal door for two days. He took the big key from the ring which hung beside his holster, fit it into the slot, and heard the mechanism clicking shut, driving the bolt. He looked at the key for a second, as if trying to see if it would open the door by itself, and then experimented by unlocking it: difficult as ever, the key taking a lot of pressure before it would move. He began to pull the door open, almost afraid to look behind it to the cells.

He remembered the screwball story Sears James and Ricky Hawthorne had tried to tell him: something out of Clark Mulligan's horror movies. A smokescreen for whatever they really knew, a thing you'd have to be crazy to believe. If they had been younger, he would have swung on both of them. They were ridiculing him, hiding something. If they weren't lawyers…

He heard a noise from the cells.

Hardesty yanked at the door and stepped through onto the narrow concrete walkway between the utility cells. Even in the darkness, the air seemed full of some dirty pink light, hazy and very faint. The bodies lay beneath their sheets, mummies in a museum. He could not have heard a noise, not possibly; unless he had heard the jail itself creaking.

He realized that he was frightened, and detested himself for it. He couldn't even tell who most of them were any more, there were so many of them, so many sheet-covered bodies… but the corpses in the first cell on his right, he knew, were Jim Hardie and Mrs. Barnes, and those two were never going to make any more noise again ever.

He looked into their cell through the bars. Their bodies were on the hard floor beneath the cot against the far wall, two still white forms. Nothing wrong there. Wait a second, he thought, trying to remember the day he had put them in the cell. Didn't he put Mrs. Barnes on top of the bunk? He was almost certain… he peered in at them. Now wait, now just hold it up a minute here, he thought, and even in the cold of the unheated cells, began to sweat. A white-covered little parcel that could only be the Griffen baby-frozen to death in his own bed-lay on the cot. "Now just wait a goddamned second," he said, "that can't be." He'd put the Griffen baby with de Souza, in a cell on the other side of the corridor.

What he wanted to do was lock the doors behind him again and open a fresh bottle-get out of this place right away-but he pushed open the cell door and stepped in. There had to be some explanation: one of the deputies had come back here and rearranged the bodies, made a little more room… but that too couldn't be, they never came back here without him… he saw Christina Barnes's blond hair leaking out from beneath the edge of her sheet. Just a second before the sheet had been tucked securely around her head.

He backed away toward the cell door, now absolutely unable to stand so near the body of Christina Barnes, and when he had reached the threshold of the cell looked wildly around at the other bodies. They all seemed subtly different, as if they'd moved an inch or so, rolled over and crossed their legs while his back had been turned. He stood in the entrance to the cell, now unpleasantly conscious that his back was turned to all those other bodies, but unable to stop looking at Christina Barnes. He thought that even more of her hair was frothing out from beneath the sheet.

When he glanced at the little form on the cot, Hardesty's stomach slammed up into his throat. As if the dead child had wriggled forward in its sheet, the top of its bald round head protruded through an opening in the sheet-a grotesque parody of birth.

Hardesty jumped backward out of the cell into the dark corridor. Though he could not see them moving, he had a wild, panicky sense that all of the bodies in the cells were in motion-that if he stayed back here in the dark a second longer, they would point toward him like the needles of a dozen magnets.

From an end cell, one he knew was empty, came a dry rasping voiceless sound. A chuckle. This empty sound of mirth unfolded in his mind, more a thought than a sound. Hardesty backed nervelessly down the corridor until he thumped into the edge of the metal door, then whirled around it and slammed it shut.