Pale Horse Coming by Stephen Hunter Page A

tried to remember. This way or that? It’s not that Thebes was a complex metropolitan zone, with byways and alleys that could lure a man to ruin, or at least get him lost. Still, in the dark, it seemed all different, and the vistas down the few streets were closed off to his eyes. But then he saw the public house where the two bitter old men had been and remembered…no, he didn’t get to the woman’s house until after he’d been there. Why hadn’t he paid attention? It hadn’t seemed important then, but it surely did now.
    At last he thought he had it, as he projected a three-dimensional map of Thebes in his mind. He passed the public house, turned down an alley, walked amid silent cabins. Dogs scuffled and scurried, and occasionally barked, and he heard the slithery, feathery rattlings of chickens twitching in their coops. A pig or two was up, for whatever reason, maybe to shit in the mud or whatever. But of people the place was forlorn and empty.
    It was a balmy Southern night. Above, towers of stars spangled in the pure black sky and a zephyr whispered through the pines, bringing relief from the day’s brutal heat. The smell of the pines was everywhere, bracing and pure, almost medicinal. With the squalor and the despair blocked out by the darkness, Sam could almost convince himself he was in some healthy place, some nonblasphemed ground.
    And then, yes, there it was. That was hers. It was different from the rest, being set farther back, almost in the woods themselves. But he recognized it by its shape and location, and as his eyes adjusted, and he moved just a bit, he made out that coop out back where he’d had the corner suite with the chickens and the disgruntled rooster.
    Sam approached stealthfully. He didn’t want it noted that the white lawyer from the North had visited old granny in the night. It would do old granny no good at all in Thebes County, Mississippi.
    Of course the door was not locked. He slipped in and stood motionless for a bit, waiting for his eyes to adjust yet again, this time to the closer dark of the interior space.
    When at last he could pick out impediments and chart a passage in the dark—say, the doorway into the bedroom to be aimed for, the stove in the middle of the room to be avoided, the rickety furniture not to be knocked asunder—he moved quietly, and slipped into her bedchamber. He was a prince come a-calling.
    No, he was a soldier of the Lord, come to bring righteous vengeance and God’s wrath to Sodom.
    No, he was a scared white man in way too deep and playing with forces he could not even begin to understand.
    He approached the bed, wondering how to waken her without making her scream and alerting the locals and the gendarmerie.
    “Madam,” he whispered, in a low voice.
    There was no response.
    “Grandma? Grandma, wake up, please, it’s me, Mr. Sam, come for a talk.”
    That was louder still, but there was no response.
    He bent to the bed where she lay swaddled and touched her arm, gently as he could, and rocked ever so slowly, crooning, “Mama, Mama, please awaken, Mama.”
    But Mama remained mute.
    He became aware of an odor, and then, through the bedclothes, his fingers sensed damp.
    He recoiled, but had to go forward.
    He turned to the candle next to the bed and found a few stick matches next to it. He struck one on the bedpost, cupping the sudden flare, and brought it to the wick, where it clung, then held fast. Again, he kept his hand cupped around it, to cut down on the light, and brought it to her, and pulled back the bedclothes.
    She had been smashed all to hell and gone. Her skull had the shocking aspect of deflation, for its integrity was breached mightily. Whatever oozed from it oozed black onto the bedclothes. Her eyes were distorted by the trauma done to her skull, and one had a bad eight-ball hemorrhage to it. It was too cool for the flies, but by midmorning they’d be here in waves.
    He had been to murder scenes too many times before, so he did not