‘If this thing actually exists,’ Alec said, ‘it is a vampire, at least sort of. It needs blood to make the next link in the chain. To perpetuate itself.’
Once again Ralph thought, Do you people hear yourselves? He liked Holly Gibney a lot, but he also wished he’d never met her. Thanks to her there was a war going on in his head, and he wished mightily for a truce.
Holly turned to Lovie. ‘That empty factory where the Ohio police found the bloody clothes is close to the graveyard where Heath Holmes and his parents are buried. More clothes were found in a barn not far from an old graveyard where some of Terry Maitland’s ancestors are buried. So here’s the question: Is there a graveyard close to here?’
Lovie considered. They waited. At last she said, ‘There’s a boneyard in Plainville, but nothing in Marysville. Hell, we don’t even have a church. There used to be one, Our Lady of Forgiveness, but it burned down twenty years ago.’
‘Shit,’ Howie muttered.
‘How about a family plot?’ Holly asked. ‘Sometimes people bury on their property, don’t they?’
‘Well, I don’t know about other folks,’ the old lady said, ‘but we never had one. My momma and daddy are buried back in Laredo, and their momma and daddy, too. Way back it’d be Indiana, which is where my people migrated down from after the Civil War.’
‘What about your husband?’ Howie asked.
‘George? All his people were from Austin, and that’s where he’s buried, right next to his parents. I used to take the bus once in a while to visit him, usually on his birthday, took flowers and all, but since I got this goddam COPD, I haven’t been.’
‘Well, I guess that’s that,’ Yune said.
Lovie seemed not to hear. ‘I could sing, you know, back when I still had my wind. And I played guitar. I came to Austin from Laredo after high school, because of the music. Nashville South, they call it. I got a job in the paper factory on Brazos Street while I was waitin for my big break at the Carousel or the Broken Spoke or wherever. Makin envelopes. I never did get my big break, but I married the foreman. That was George. Never regretted it until he retired.’
‘I think we’re drifting off the subject,’ Howie said.
‘Let her talk,’ Ralph said. He had that little tingle, the feel of something coming. Still over the horizon, but yes, coming. ‘Go on, Mrs Bolton.’
She looked doubtfully at Howie, but when Holly nodded and smiled, Lovie smiled back, lit another cigarette, and went on.
‘Well, after he got his thirty in and had his pension, George moved us out here to the back of beyond. Claude was just twelve – we had him late, long after we decided God wasn’t going to give us no children. Claude never liked Marysville, missed the bright lights and his worthless friends – bad company was always my boy’s downfall – and I didn’t care for it much either at first, although I have come to enjoy the peace of it. When you get old, peace is about all you want. You folks might not believe that now, but you’ll find out. And that idea of a family plot ain’t such a bad one, now I think of it. I could do worse than going into the ground out back, but I s’pose Claude will end up dragging my meat and bones to Austin, so I can lay with my husband, like I did in life. Won’t be long now, neither.’
She coughed, looked at her cigarette with distaste, and buried it with the others in the overfilled ashtray, where it smoldered balefully.
‘You know why we happened to end up in Marysville? George had the idea he was going to raise alpacas. After they died, which didn’t take long, it was going to be goldendoodles. If you don’t know, goldendoodles are a cross between golden retrievers and poodles. You think eeva-lution ever approved of a mix like that? I goddam doubt it. His brother put the notion in his head. No greater fool than Roger Bolton ever walked the earth, but George thought their fortunes was made. Roger moved down here with his family and the two of em went partners. Anyway, the goldendoodle pups died, just like the alpacas. George and me were a little tight for money after that, but we had enough to get by. Roger, though, he poured his whole savings into that damn fool scheme. So he looked around for work and …’
She stopped, an expression of amazement dawning on her face.
‘What about Roger?’ Ralph asked.
‘Damn,’ Lovie Bolton said. ‘I’m old, but that’s no excuse. It was right in front of my face.’
Ralph leaned forward and took one of her hands. ‘What are you talking about, Lovie?’ Going to her first name, as he always eventually did in the interrogation room.
‘Roger Bolton and his two sons – Claude’s cousins – are buried not four miles from here, along with four other men. Or maybe ’twas five. And those children, of course, them twins.’ She shook her head slowly back and forth. ‘I was so mad when Claude got six months in Gatesville for stealing. And ashamed. That’s when he started using drugs, you know. But I saw later it was God’s mercy. Because if he’d been here, he would have been with them. Not his dad, by then George had already had two heart attacks and couldn’t go, but Claude … yes, he would have been with them.’
‘Where?’ Alec asked. He was leaning forward now, staring intently.
‘The Marysville Hole,’ she said. ‘That’s where those men died, and that’s where they remain.’
10
She told them it had been like the part in Tom Sawyer when Tom and Becky get lost in the cave, only Tom and Becky eventually got out. The Jamieson twins, just eleven years old, never did. Nor did those who tried to rescue them. The Marysville Hole took them all.
‘That’s where your brother-in-law got work after the dog business failed?’ Ralph asked.
She nodded. ‘He’d done some explorin there – not in the public part, but on the Ahiga side – so when he applied, they hired him on as a guide quick as winkin. Him and the other guides used to take tourists down in groups of a dozen or so. It’s the biggest cave in all of Texas, but the most popular part, what folks really wanted to see, was the main chamber. It was quite a place, all right. Like a cathedral. They called it the Chamber of Sound, because of the what-do-you-call-em, acoustics. One of the guides would stand at the bottom, four or five hundred feet down, and whisper the Pledge of Allegiance, and the people at the top would hear every word. Echoes seemed to go on forever. Also, the walls were covered with Indian drawings, I forget the word for em—’
‘Pictographs,’ Yune said.
‘That’s it. You got a Coleman gas lamp when you went in, so you could look at em, or up at the stalactites hangin down from the ceiling. There was an iron spiral staircase that went all the way to the bottom, four hundred steps or more, around and around and around. It’s still there, I shouldn’t wonder, although I wouldn’t trust it these days. It’s damp down there, and iron rusts. Only time I took them stairs, it made me dizzy as hell, and I wasn’t even lookin up at the stalactites, like most of em. You want to believe I took the elevator back to the top. Goin down is one thing, but only a pure-d fool climbs up four hundred steps if she don’t have to.
‘The bottom was two, maybe three hundred yards across. There were colored lights set up to show off all the mineral streaks in the rocks, there was a snack bar, and there were six or eight passageways to explore. They had names. Can’t recall all of them, but there was the Navajo Art Gallery – where there were more pictographs – and the Devil’s Slide, and Snake’s Belly, where you had to bend over and even crawl in places. Can you imagine?’
‘Yes,’ Holly said. ‘Oough.’
‘Those were the main ones. There were even more leadin off from them, but they were closed off, because the Hole isn’t just one cave but dozens of em, goin down and down, some never explored.’
‘Easy to get lost,’ Alec said.
‘You bet. Now here’s what happened. There were two or three openins leadin away from the Snake’s Belly passageway that weren’t boarded over or barred up, because they were considered too small to bother with.’