Cold moon over Babylon

  THE LARKINS ARE

  THE NICEST FOLKS

  YOU’D EVER WANT TO MEET.

  UNTIL KILL THEM

  It is blueberry harvest time in the Florida town of Babylon. The Larkins are farmers—proud grandmother, hardworking young man, budding young woman—bound to the land, sharing small joys and sorrows, struggling to forget the horror buried so long ago.

  Then it happens again.

  Margaret Larkin is the first victim—and one by one the rest of the Larkins fall prey to the same faceless menace. The killer remains free. But something strange is happening in Babylon: traffic lights flash an eerie blue; a ghostly hand slithers from the drain of a kitchen sink; graves erupt from the local cemetery in an implacable march of terror...

  The Larkins, though dead, have returned.

  Other Avon books by

  Michael McDowell

  THE AMULET

  COLD MOON OVER BABYLON is an original publication of Avon Books.

  This work has never before appeared in book form.

  AVON BOOKS

  A division of

  The Hearst Corporation

  959 Eighth Avenue

  New York, New York 10019

  Copyright © 1980 by Michael McDowell

  Published by arrangement with the author

  Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 79-56235

  ISBN: 0-380-48660-1

  All rights reserved, which includes the right

  to reproduce this book or portions thereof in

  any form whatsoever. For information address

  The Otte Company, 9 Goden Street,

  Belmont, Mass. 02178

  First Avon Printing, February, 1980

  AVON TRADEMARK REG. U.S. PAT. OFF. AND IN

  OTHER COUNTRIES, MARCA REGISTRADA, HECHO EN U.S.A.

  Printed in the U.S.A.

  In memory of

  Marian Mulkey McDowell

  Look down fair moon and bathe this scene,

  Pour softly down night’s nimbus floods on faces ghastly, swollen, purple,

  On the dead on their backs with arms toss’d wide, Pour down your unstinted nimbus sacred moon.

  —Walt Whitman

  Sequel to Drum-Taps

  Prologue

  One hot afternoon in July of 1965, Jim Larkin and his wife JoAnn were slowly paddling their small green boat upstream on the Styx River that drains the northwestern corner of the Florida panhandle. Having spent the several hours around noon lazily fishing in a favorite spot, half a mile downriver from their blueberry farm, they were bringing back enough bream for themselves and half the town of Babylon besides. Jim’s widowed mother, Evelyn Larkin, was back at the farm, taking care of their son Jerry, eight years old, and their infant daughter Margaret, born only the year before.

  JoAnn Larkin, who had pale skin and dark red hair, and always wore dark red lipstick and matching nail polish even when she was working in the patch, had already started to clean the fish, and was idly scraping scales back into the water. Her husband, Evelyn Larkin’s only child, paddled slowly, and kept his face turned away from the sun. He had to be careful about burn, and considered that it was a sore trial for a farmer and his wife to have fair skin.

  “What’s that?” JoAnn said curiously, and pointed at something in the water, twenty feet away.

  “It’s a croker sack,” Jim Larkin replied, and turned the boat a little so that they would come nearer it.

  “It’s not one of ours, is it?” she said. “I don't think it’s one of ours. Who’d be throwing our croker sacks in the river?”

  “I don’t know. We ought to take it back. Good croker sacks are getting harder to come by every day. Looks dry. Must have just fell in from somewhere.”

  JoAnn leaned over the prow, and snared the sack. She swung it over the side of the boat, and set it between herself and her husband. The string that held the top together had already come loose in the water, and the sack fell open in her hands. With dampened rattles, five snakes slithered out over the lip of the burlap.

  The man and woman drew back in fear, pushing frantically against the rattlesnakes with their feet. Each was bitten several times, and probably would have suffered more had not their thrashing panic overturned the small boat.

  Jim Larkin dived deep, and in a few seconds attempted to come up for air. Among the dead bream that floated on the surface of the water, he could see the snakes coiled and waiting. Their tails swaying slowly in the water beckoned him upward. He lost consciousness and drowned.

  Jo Ann Larkin swam to a sandbar, crawled across it, and fell into a sand-sink, which are as common as leeches along the margin of the Styx. She was sucked in slowly, and all the while never left off calling her husband’s name. But she gave over all resistance to the sinking sand when she saw his corpse rise suddenly to the surface of the water, and bob among the dead fish. His head was thrown back, his eyes wide, and one of the snakes pushed its way into his slack mouth.

  Their bodies were never recovered. JoAnn Larkin’s skeleton, white and contorted, still lies frozen in the sand a dozen feet below the surface of the Styx. Jim Larkin was spun a couple of miles downstream, and then wedged into a rocky crevice in the bed of the river; there the normally sluggish black waters of the Styx, rushing through this submerged ravine, industriously pried the rotting flesh from his bones.

  Evelyn Larkin had nothing of her son and daughter-in-law to mourn over and bury. The overturned boat, protecting the nested croker sacks and two drowned rattlesnakes, told no plausible story of their deaths. One July morning they had rowed down the Styx and simply failed to return.

  Though she had no remembrance of her parents, Margaret Larkin never went swimming in the river, for fear that she would be dragged down to the bottom by her drowned mother and father. And her brother Jerry never after crossed the bridge over the Styx without glancing uneasily among the pilings, dreading to see there his parents’ decayed corpses. Yet they said nothing of these irrational terrors to one another, nor to their grandmother, who never lost the feeling that her son and daughter-in-law were still to be found somewhere in the river’s meandering length,

  Eventually, a small cenotaph was raised in the Larkin family plot in the Babylon cemetery. It was marked with the names of the couple and bore the simple legend: lost upon the styx. 14 July 1965.

  Part I

  Crossing the Styx

  Chapter 1

  Three roads lead out of Babylon. The first takes you to Pensacola, forty miles to the southeast. In Pensacola are the Escambia County Courthouse, the discount liquor stores, the dog tracks, and the dazzling white beaches of the Florida Gulf coast. The route is well traveled,

  The second road out of Babylon heads southwest, to Mobile, only sixty miles away. Babylon is in the very upper corner of the panhandle of Florida, with the Alabama border only ten miles to the north and the west alike. People from the town go to Mobile to buy their Christmas presents and to have braces put on their children’s teeth.

  But a third road leads out of Babylon as well, a small winding third-grade road, grudgingly maintained with county funds. By it, you get to other towns just over the line in southwestern Alabama, towns that are quieter, and poorer, and even smaller than Babylon itself.

  The forest encroaches so thickly on this third road that tree roots split the asphalt, and large single oaks in places completely overshadow both narrow lanes. Three- quarters of a mile out of town, this road crosses the murky Styx River, a wide slow stream with occasional short stretches of black-foamed rapids that empties into the even slower and murkier Perdido River a few miles to the west. The Perdido forms the extreme western boundary of Florida with Alabama.

  The bridge over the Styx, built just after Wor
ld War I, consists of thick planks set across iron rails; these rest on three sets of wooden pilings. When a plank splits or rots through, it is replaced by Jerry Larkin, the only man living within a mile of the bridge. The county cut a large number of these boards for that purpose, and left them with Jerry, so that its road crews would not be bothered with this remotest area of Escambia County. The Styx River road is not so well traveled that it needs much repair from one year to the next, but planks disappear from the bridge with annoying frequency.

  The land around Babylon is thickly, wooded, boggy near the rivers and numerous streams, and soft spongy with many centuries of rotted pine needles everywhere else. A few wild dogwoods bloom in the spring; acorns fall from the oak trees in the autumn, but otherwise the seasons appear pretty much the same, for the land is green all year round with the ubiquitous pines. These trees are so thickly spread that the sun is kept from all but the top branches. The lower limbs brown, wither, rot, and drop off. Around the Larkin house, for instance, is a stand of long-leaf pine, three or four hundred in number, eighty feet tall, but with living branches for only the uppermost twenty feet or so. The house is in perpetual shade, and never knows the sun. But the Larkins don’t mind, for the trees don’t shadow their blueberry bushes, and they keep the house protected and cool through the oppressive six-month summers of this part of the country.

  The Styx River, because of its slow movement, and its frequent sandbars, stagnant marginal pools, and dead courses, is infested with mosquitoes, leeches, and snakes. This whole part of Escambia County is sparsely populated, and almost no one lives along the rivers. Higher land is for building: away from the insects and the danger of spring flooding. Although the Styx meanders a course that is nearly forty miles long, only four persons live actually within sight of it. One is an old black woman whose shack is perilously near the junction with the Perdido. She is deaf and mad.

  The other three live just on the other side of the single bridge that spans the Styx. Old Evelyn Larkin and her grandchildren, Jerry and Margaret, are there because of the blueberries.

  Blueberries grew wild in the bogs and swamps of this part of the country long before the Spaniards arrived, but they were not cultivated until about the turn of the century. They grow best in well-drained land that is yet very damp, and an ideal situation for blueberries was that portion of the Larkin property along the Styx River: several clear acres that sloped from the old farmhouse down to the river’s edge.

  The plants are enormous and very old, with eight or nine bushes, seven to eight feet high, to the single root system. No one remembers now who first planted them or whether they had grown wild there before. Evelyn Larkin’s husband had owned them and the house when she married him, and she could not now recall how he had come by them.

  These overgrown luxuriant plants were not arranged in orderly rows, but were an intricate unplanned maze over five acres, so confused that sometimes even Jerry and Margaret lost their way. For fifty years the Larkin blueberry farm had practically run itself. The soil was rich, and the climate of the Florida panhandle perfectly suited for the cultivation of the fruit. The plants had to be kept trimmed, and the berries had to be picked. No fertilizer was used because none was needed, and it seemed unlikely that there was any way to improve the yield of the plants, which by the middle of June were heavy laden with the succulent dark blue berries. Jerry and his sister Margaret shooed the birds away and killed snakes that crawled along the paths and pulled up seedlings of pine and oak that had settled into the ripe spongy ground—but there was little else to do. At harvest, it was the custom for the local Boy Scout and Girl Scout groups to come out to the farm and pick the berries all day long. They were paid ten cents a pint for their labor. Jerry drove the berries to Pensacola, and they were shipped north. It had never been a really profitable concern, but it was all that they knew.

  For a dozen years after the disappearance of Jim and JoAnn Larkin the seasonal berries had seen the remainder of the family through the year. This was certainly well, for it had been demonstrated by Evelyn’s husband many years before that the land was really good for nothing else. But for some years now inflation had reduced their margin of solvency. In the late spring, just before the beginning of the picking season, Evelyn had found it necessary to take funds from the sacred account of her husband’s insurance money to get them through. She hadn’t known what they would do when this resource was expended, and had hoped continually for a pronounced rise in the price they were paid for the berries, but that remained stable when everything else went up. Then, just three years before, floods in April had done serious damage to the first floor and foundations of the house, and had killed off nearly a quarter of the plants. The last of the insurance money was employed on repairs to the house, and beyond that, a bank loan had to be secured to support them the following year, for the crop that summer was much smaller than usual. Evelyn trembled nightly. They had no financial cushion now, but were forced to make monthly payments on that large loan. Several times in the past year she had been late on the installments, and now had received notice that May’s was past due. April’s had not been paid at all. The berries wouldn’t bring in cash for another two weeks.

  The future of the farm wasn’t bright either. Jerry Larkin, though he was afraid to speak of it to his grandmother, had noticed a gradual deterioration of the blueberry plants. The foliage was as lush as ever, was if anything thicker and more profuse season by the season, but the yield was lower each year, and the berries of decreasing size and quality. The bushes had simply grown too old.

  One morning, in a part of the patch that he knew was not visible from Evelyn Larkin's bedroom window, Jerry attempted to dig up one of the plants, a large specimen that he had tagged as having a particularly small number of berries. He was able to dig a trench around it to a depth of about six inches, but could not go deeper; the roots were a solid cordon below that, fibrous and fine individually, but tough and unyielding in aggregate. Dynamite might get the bush out, but nothing else. And this root system, he realized, must underlie all five acres, like the marrow of a bone. No new improved strains of bushes could be planted and expected to grow.

  As an experiment, he had tried cutting off one of the bushes at the ground. His father had explained to him that the roots would quickly replace the missing plants with new shoots. After a couple of years, Jerry was glad that he had not tried this experiment extensively, for though the bush grew back quickly enough, the berries were still lower in quality than those on the surrounding plants, and often shriveled in the sun before they could be picked.

  Jerry came to the conclusion that the ground below was tiring out at an accelerative rate. He tried increasing amounts of expensive fertilizer, following the advice of the county agricultural agent (who Jerry came to suspect didn't know much about blueberries), but the ground soaked it in without apparent effect. It seemed likely that more fertilizer than Jerry could afford would be required to feed the thousands of cubic feet of roots beneath this gently sloping ground.

  After the deaths of her son and daughter-in-law, Evelyn Larkin had managed the farm herself, with the help of one hired man. When Jerry graduated from high school, he took over the farm, and the salaried worker was let go. Although Evelyn depended upon the blueberry patch for her sustenance, she had an aversion to the place. Too often when she was working down among the oldest, largest bushes on the edge of the Styx, she grew nervous about snakes, and found herself staring for long minutes at the muddy waters of the river. When her grandson tactfully suggested that she not bother herself any longer with the blueberry patch, Evelyn retreated gratefully to the farmhouse.

  Jerry knew that eventually the blueberry crop would fail entirely, or at any rate, with inflation and increased competition from new farms, it would cease to support them. He hoped fervently that he would be able to survive financially as long as Evelyn Larkin lived—but he could not hope beyond that. After his grandmother died, and he was miserable just thinking of such a ti
me, he would sell the place for whatever little it would bring, and move well away from Babylon. He wondered what sort of job was available to a man who knew everything there was to know about blueberries—and very little about anything else. Sometimes in the winter he worked at a filling station or at the grocery store as a bag boy, when such positions could be had—but they would not support him, he knew. And understandably, these jobs were now going to those younger than himself.

  Margaret, of course, was another problem. Though she seemed now not much more than a child, in four years she would graduate from high school. Jerry had always hoped that at that time she would be able to go away to college. Now he was certain there would not be money to cover such an expense. Margaret would simply have to make it on her own. She could go to the university in Tallahassee, or in Pensacola, if she could obtain a scholarship; if not, she would have to find work. Jerry had wanted to make things easy for his sister, but he understood now that Margaret was probably in for as rough a time as he had of it.

  Jerry was not overly intelligent, had not done well in school, but he was hard-working and responsible. He was in a perpetual state of indignation that no one except Evelyn Larkin and his sister Margaret thought that the orderly running of the blueberry farm was any accomplishment. Over the last several years he had grown sullen as well, depressed by his blocked diminishing future. He would not desert his grandmother, and had resolved he would care for her as she had always cared for him. Two changes only he saw in his life to come, both inevitable: the death of Evelyn and the deterioration of the farm into bankruptcy. Evelyn Larkin marked the growing intractability in her grandson, but because she was assured of his continued affection for her, and because he never mentioned the possibility of leaving her, she set it down to “growing pains.”