Clive Barker - Everville

He looked up, straight up above his head, because that was where the cracks usually began, but the blue was flaw less. Puzzled, he studied the sky for maybe fifteen minutes, during which time the meeting in the committee room was brought to a tidy conclusion, and Erwin decided to tell the truth to the largest audience he could find, and somewhere behind closed drapes in a house on the edge of town, Phoebe Cobb began to quietly weep.

"What's wrong?"

"Don't stop."

"You're crying, baby-"

"It's all right. I'll be all right." She reached behind her; put her hand on his buttocks, pressing him home, and as she did, the three words she'd kept under lock and key escaped.

"I love you."

Oh Lord, what had she said? Now he'd leave her. Run away and find some other desperate woman, who didn't tell him she loved him when all he wanted was a fuck in the afternoon. A younger woman; a slimmer woman.

"I'm sorry," she said.

"So am I," he replied.

There! He was going to pull out and leave right now.

"It's going to cause a lot of trouble, what's happening with you and me."

He kept fucking her while he talked, not missing a stroke, and it was such bliss she was sure she'd missed the sense of what he'd said. He couldn't have meant

"I love you back. Oh baby, I love you so much. I can't think straight sometimes. It's like I'm in a daze till I'm here. Right here."

It would be too cruel of him to lie, and he wasn't cruel, she knew that, which meant he was telling the truth.

Oh Lord, he loved her, he loved her, and if all the trouble in the world would come down on their heads because Of it, she didn't care.

She started to turn in his arms so that she could be face to face with him. It was a difficult maneuver, but her body was different in his arms, lusher and more malleable. Now came those kisses she could feel the day after; the kisses that made her lips burn and her tongue ache; the kisses that brought the tremors that had her shaking and hollering as though possessed. Only today there were words between them, promises of his undying devotion. And the tremors, when they came, rose from some place that was not in any anatomy book on the doctor's shelf. An invisible, unnameable place that neither God nor tumors could touch.

"Oh, I almost forgot-" he said while they were dressing, and fumbled around in the top pocket of his overalls. "I wanted you to have this. And after this afternoon-well, it's more important than ever."

He pulled out a photograph and handed it to her.

"That's my Mom, that's my brother Ron, he's the baby of the family, and that'@) my sister Noreen. Oh yeah, and that'@ me." He was in uniform, and shining with pride. "i look good, huh?"

"When was this taken?"

"The week after I came out of basic training," he said.

"Why didn't you stay in the army?"

"It's a long story," he said, his smile fading.

"You don't have to-" The phone interrupted her. "Oh shit! I'm not going to answer that."

"It could be important."

"Yeah, and it could be Morton," she said. I don't want to talk to him right now."

"We don't want him getting suspicious," Joe said, "at least till we've made up our minds how we're going to handle all this."

She sighed, nodded, and hurried down to the phone, calling back as she went: "We have to talk about this soon."

"How 'bout tomorrow? Same time?" She told him yes, then picked up the receiver. It wasn't Morton, it was Emmeline Harper, who ran the Historical Society, an overwrought woman with a puffed up view of her own importance.

"Phoebe-"

"Emmeline?"

"Phoebe, I need a favor. Dorothy just called, and apparently somebody needs to get into the schoolhouse to look through the records. I can't get over there, and I was wondering would you be a sweetheart?" No was on the tip of Phoebe's tongue. Then Emmeline said: "It's that nice Mr. Toothaker, the attorney? Have you met him?"

"Yes. A couple of years back." A bit of a cold fish, as she remembered. But maybe this wouldn't be such a bad time to talk to a man who knew the law. She could quietly quiz him about divorce, and maybe she'd learn something to her advantage.

"I mean I'm sure he's very trustworthy-I don't think for a moment he'd tamper with the collection, but I think somebody should be there to let him in and show him what's what." "Fine."

"He's over at the Chamber of Commerce. Can I call F: over and say you'll be twenty minutes?"

Society had been a repository for all manner of items relating to the city's past. One of the first and most valuable bequests came from Hubert Nordhoff, whose family had owned and run the mill that now stood deserted on the Molina road, three-quarters of a mile out of town. In the three and a half decades between 1880 and 1915, the Nordhoff Mill had pro vided employment for a good portion of Everville's citizens, while helping to amass a considerable fortune for the Nordhoffs. they had built a mansion in Salem, and another in Oregon City, before withdrawing from the blanket- and fabric-making business and putting their money into lumber, real estate (most of it in Portland), and even, it was rumored, an-naments. Hubert Nordhoff's bequest of some thousand photographs of life at the mill, along with several other pieces of memorabilia, had been widely interpreted as a belated act of contrition for his ancestor's sudden desertion; the years immediately following the closure of the mill had been Everville's darkest hour, economically speaking.

The Nordhoff bequest had begun a small avalanche of gifts. Seventeen watercolors of local scenes, prettily if some what blandly painted by the wife of Everville's first dentist, were now framed and hung in the walls of the schoolhouse

(the renovation of which had been paid for by H. Nordhoff).

A collection of walking sticks topped with the heads of fantastical animals, carved by one of the city's great eccentrics, Milius Biggs, was displayed in a glass case in what had been the principal's office.

But far outnumbering these aesthetic bequests were more mundane offerings, most of them from ordinary Evervillians. School reports, wedding announcements, obituaries, family albums, a collection of cuttings from The Oregonian, all of which mentioned the town (this assembled by the librarian Stanley Tharp, who had stammered traumatically for sixty-one years but on his deathbed had recited Milton's Paradise Lost without a stumble), and of course family letters in their hundreds.

The labor of organizing such a large body of material was slow, given that all the Society's workers were volunteers. Two of the schoolhouse's five rooms were still piled high with boxes of unsorted gifts, but for those visitors interested in Everville's past, the remaining three rooms offered a pleasant, if somewhat over-tidy, glimpse of the early days.

It was highly selective of course, but then so were most history lessons. There was no place in this celebration of the Evervillian spirit for the darker side; for images of destitution, or suicide, or worse. No room, either, for any individual who didn't fit the official version of how things had come to be. There were pictures of the city in its infancy, and accounts of how its roads were laid and its fine houses built. But of Maeve O'Connell, who had ventured to the shores of another world, and returned to make her father's dream real, there was no sign. And in that disinheritance lay the seeds of Everville's undoing.

Phoebe was a little late coming for Erwin, but he was all politeness. He was soriy to be inconveniencing her this way, he said, but it really was urgent business. No, he couldn't really tell her what it was about, but it would be public knowledge before very long, and he'd be certain to thank her for her kindness in print. There was no need, she insisted; but she'd be very grateful if after the weekend she could come and pick his brains in a legal matter. He readily agreed. was she planning to make a will?