Where the Summer Ends - By Karl Edward Wagner Page 0,134
for conversation.
His office was a block or two away—an upstairs room in a ramshackle office building only slightly less disreputable in appearance than the dilapidated Edwardian mansion turned community clinic where Russ worked. This was several blocks in the other direction, so the bar made a convenient meeting place for them. Afternoons often found the pair talking over a pitcher of beer (Knoxville bars could not serve liquor at the time), and the bartender—a huge red-bearded Viking named Blackie—knew them both by name.
“You were saying that your faith in the supernatural was fraught with skepticism,” Mandarin reminded, wiping foam from his mustache.
“No. I said it was tempered with rationality,” Stryker hedged. “That doesn’t mean I don’t believe in the supernatural. It means I examine facts with several of those famous grains of salt before I offer them to my readers.”
“I take it then you’re going to use this business today in your new book.”
Stryker nodded enthusiastically. “It’s worth a chapter, I’m certain.”
“Well, that’s your judgement, of course,” commented Mandarin, glancing at his watch. “Personally, I didn’t read any irrefutable evidence of the supernatural into all this.”
“Science scoffing under the shadow of truths inadmissible to its system of logic.” Stryker snorted. “You’re as blind in your beliefs as the old-guard priesthood holding the bastions of disease-by-wrath-of-God against the germ-theory heretics.”
“I suppose,” Russ admitted around a belch.
“But then, I forgot that you were back in Libby’s room while I was finishing up the interview with Gayle Corrington,” Stryker said suddenly. “Hell, you missed out on what I considered the most significant and intriguing part of her story. Let me read this off to you.” He fumbled for his notepad.
Mandarin had had enough of hauntings for the day. “Let me have you fill me in later,” he begged off. “I’ve got an evening clinic tonight, and I’d like to run back to the house beforehand and get packed.”
“Going out of town?”
“I need to see my high-priced lawyers in New York tomorrow.”
“That’s right. How’s that look?”
Russ frowned, said with more confidence than he felt: “I think we’ll make our case. Police just can’t burglarize a physician’s confidential files in order to get evidence for a drug bust.”
“Well, I wish you luck,” Stryker allowed. “There’s a few angles I want to check out on this business first, anyway. I’ll probably have the chapter roughed out by the time you’re back in town. Why don’t I give you a carbon then, and let you comment?”
“Fine.” Russ stood up and downed his beer. “Can I give you a lift somewhere?”
“Thanks—but I’ve got my car parked just down the block. You take it easy driving back though.”
Russ grinned. “Sure. Take it easy yourself.”
Two nights later Mandarin’s phone woke him up. Stryker hadn’t taken it easy.
•IV•
Dishevelled and coatless in the misty rain, Mandarin stood glumly beside the broken guardrail. It was past 3 AM. His clothes looked slept in, which they were. He’d continued the cocktail hour that began on his evening flight from New York once he got home. Sometime toward the end of the network movie that he wasn’t really watching he fell asleep on the couch. The set was blank and hissing when he stumbled awake to answer the phone.
“Hello, Russ,” greeted Saunders, puffing up the steep bank from the black lakeshore. His face was grim. “Thought you ought to be called. You’re about as close to him as anyone Stryker had here.”
Mandarin swallowed and nodded thanks. With the back of his hand he wiped the beads of mist and sweat from his face. Below them the wrecker crew and police diver worked to secure cables to the big maroon Buick submerged there. Spotlights, red tail lights burning through the mist. Yellow beacon on the wrecker, blue flashers on the two patrol cars. It washed the brush-grown lakeshore with a flickering nightmarish glow. Contorted shadows wavered around objects made grotesque, unreal. It was like a Daliesque landscape.
“What happened, Ed?” he managed to say.
The police lieutenant wiped mud from his hands. “Nobody saw it. No houses along this stretch, not a lot of traffic this hour of night.”
An ambulance drove up slowly, siren off. Static outbursts of the two-way radios echoed like sick thunder in the silence.
“Couple of kids parked on a side road down by the lake. Thought they heard brakes squeal, then a sort of crashing noise. Not loud enough to make them stop what they were doing, and they’d been hearing cars drive by fast off and on all night. But they remembered it