Clive Barker - Everville

No, she said, I'm planning to divorce my husband. to which he replied divorce was not really his area of expertise but he'd be happy to chat with her about it In confidence, she said. Of course, he told her. She should drop by his offices on Monday morning.

The schoolhouse was still baking hot, even though it was now close to six, and while Phoebe went around raising the blinds and opening the windows, Erwin wandered from room to stifling room, peering at the pictures. "Can you tell me what you're looking for?" Phoebe asked him.

"I mean, vaguely."

"Back issues of the Tribune, for one thing," Erwin said. "Apparently they don't have room to keep them at their offices, so they're here."

"And what else?"

"Well, I'm not familiar with the collection. Is it arranged chronologically?"

"I'm not sure. I think so." She led Erwin through to the back room, where six tables were piled with files. "I used to come and help sort through things," she said. "But this last year's been so hectic-" She flicked through one of the piles. "These are all marked nineteen forty to forty-five." She moved on to the next pile. "And these are forty-five to fifty."

"So it's in increments of half-decades."

"Right."

"Well that's a start. And the newspapers?"

Phoebe pointed through the adjacent door. "they are in order. I know,

'cause I was the one did it."

"Wonderful. I'll get started then."

:'Do you want me to wait till you're finished?"

'It depends how patient you're feeling."

"Not very," she said with a little laugh. "Maybe I should just jot down my telephone number, and when you're done@' "I'll call you and you can come over and lock up."

"Right."

"That's a deal then." She went to the front desk, wrote her number on one of the Society brochures, and took it back to him. He was already plundering the contents of one of the files.

"You will put everything back, won't you?" Phoebe said, in her best forbidding manner.

"Oh yes. I'll be careful," Erwin replied. He took the brochure from her. "I'll call you when I'm done," he said. "I hope it won't be too late."

As she got into the car she thought: What would happen if I never went home again? If I just drove to Joe's place now and left town tonight? It was a tempting idea-not to have to go back to the house and cook dinner and listen to Morton bitching about every damn thing-but she resisted it. If her future with Joe was to have a chance then she had to plan it: carefully, systematically. they weren't teenagers, eloping in the first flush of love. If they were going to leave Everville permanently (and she couldn't imagine their staying, once the truth was out) then they had responsibilities to turn over and farewells to take.

She'd be happy never to see the house or Morton or the stinking ashtrays he left behind him ever again, but she'd miss Dr. Powell, along with a handful of his regulars. She'd need to take the time to explain herself to the people she valued most, so that they knew she was going for love's sake, not because she was fickle or cruel.

So, she'd stay, and enjoy her last Festival in Everville. Indeed, thinking of it that way gave her a taste for the celebrations she'd not had in years. This weekend she'd get out and party, knowing that next year, come August, she'd be in another part of the world.

Hunger always made Morton bad-tempered, so rather than have him wait while she cooked, she went by Kitty's Diner to pick up a burger and fries. It was now three years since the death of Kitty Cowhick, and despite hard economic times her son-in-law Bosley had turned the place from a shabby little establishment into a thriving business. He was born Again, and brought his strict moral viewpoint to bear in managing the diner. He forbade, for instance, the reading of any literature he deemed indecent in the booths or at the counter, and if a breath of profanity was exhaled he personally requested that the guilty party leave. She'd seen him do it too. I want this to be a place the Lord himself could come to, he'd told her once, if He wanted a piece of pie.

Morton's burger purchased, she set off home, only to find the house deserted. Morton had been back-his work jacket was on the kitchen table, along with a couple of empty beer cans-but he'd apparently tired of waiting for her to come home, and gone out in search of something to eat. She was pleased: It gave her a little more time to @.

She sat at the kitchen table picking over the soggy fries, and used the pad she usually made her shopping lists on to jot down the things she wanted to take with her when she left. There wasn't much. Just a few bits and pieces that had some sentimental significance: a chair she'd inherited from her mother; some needlepoint her grandmother had made; the quilt in the spare bedroom.

thinking of the quilt, she left off her list-making and turned her mind back to the deeds of the afternoon. Or rather, to the deed performed in that room. It would not always be so wonderful, she counseled herself, the heat between them would be bound to mellow over the years. But if and when that happened, there would be a weight of feeling that re. And ffim would be memories of events like this aftenoon that would spring to rwnd every time she pressed her face to the quilt.

A little after eight-thirty, with his stomach growling for want of dinner, Erwin's search through the woefully disorganized files turned up an odd little pamphlet, penned by one Raymond Merkle. He knew the name, vaguely. The man had made himself a minor reputation as a chronicler of smalltown Oregon. Erwin had seen companion volumes to this in the bookstore in Wilsonville. The text was a curious compendium of facts about Everville, written in the belabored style of a man who had aspirations to being a writer but precious little ear for language. It was entitled These Dreaming Hills, which turned out to be a quote from a piece printed (without the name of the poet, so Erwin assumed it to be Merkle) of doggerel at the front of the pamphlet. And there, halfway through this little labor of love, Erwin encountered the following: That the forces of heinous and unrepentant evil make their barbaric mark in a city as sweetly favored as Everville should come as no surprise to those of us who have seen something of the larger world. 1, your author, ventured from the fertile climes of our glorious state in the fortythird year of this century to perform my duties as an American in the South Pacific, and will carry to my grave the scenes of cruelty and human degradation I witnessed there, in surroundings as paradisaical as any this globe can offer.

It surprised me then not at all to discover, in the course of preparing this volume, rumors of diabolical deeds performed within the precincts of Everville's comely community.

The sad story of the death of Rebecca Jenkins is well known. She was a daughter of that fair city, much prized and adored, who was murdered in her eighth year, her body deposited in the reservoir. Her murderer was a man out of Sublimity who later died in prison while serving a life sentence. But the mystery surrounding the tragedy of poor Rebecca does not end there.

While gathering stories about the stranger incidents associated with Everville, the quizzical demise of one Richard Dolan was whispered to me. He had owned a candy store, I was told, and little Rebecca Jenkins had been a regular customer of his, so he had taken the death of the child particularly hard. The.capture and subsequent incarceration of her unrepentant murderer had done nothing to subjugate his great uneasiness. He had become more and more melancholy, and on the night of September

19, 1975, he had told his wife he was hearing voices from Harmon's Heights. Somebody was calling to him, he said. When she asked him who, he refused to say, but took himself off into the night. He did not return, and the next day a party ascended the Heights to look for him.