Living Witness(132)

He picked up the file on top of the stack. It was labeled Barrington Cross Hunt, and he should have had it put in storage years ago. He remembered Barrington Cross Hunt. He’d been the “village atheist” when Henry was growing up, because nobody in Snow Hill would dare to call old Annie-Vic any such thing. It was to Barrington that Henry had gone when he had first been thinking about starting a chapter of the American Humanist Association, and it was Barrington who had explained to him why it would never work.

“There’s too much downside in it,” Barrington had said, sucking on a pipe as if it were a baby bottle. “Of course there are humanists here, and atheists and agnostics. There always have been, and there always have been more of them than anybody would guess. But to come out and say that’s what you are is a disaster in a place like Snow Hill. Everybody would stop talking to you. You’d barely be employable.”

Henry put the folder down. It was only half true, all of that. The town hadn’t ostracized Barrington Cross Hunt, and it hadn’t ostracized Henry, either. The hostility was more subtle. It was in the way people talked to you, and in the things they said when they knew you weren’t quite out of hearing. And there was more, of course. There were the things they said to each other in private, and the things that had gotten two people killed already with maybe a third to come. It was this tightwire act they were all engaged in, this trying to believe things they had to know were not true. Part of Henry didn’t believe they did believe them. He thought they only wanted to believe them. That was why they got so crazy when something came along to make what they believed obviously untrue. It was as if you’d knocked the foundation out of one of their houses.

Books to Print, Henry reminded himself. The damned thing had to be around here somewhere. He had to find it, and he had to find it today. He had work to do. It didn’t matter if Christine was there to help him do it or not.

Maybe there was some woman in the development who would like a job as a legal secretary. That would be something. Henry loved the people in the development. They were like a promise from another world. Out there somewhere, away from Snow Hill and all the places like it, there was a real world with real people in it.

The sound he was hearing was definitely a knock. It was a very faint knock, which meant it must be coming from the outer office, or maybe all the way from the front door. Christine had left her keys on her desk when she’d marched out of the office yesterday. Maybe she’d changed her mind and wanted to come back.

Henry got up and went out. In the other office, the knocking was louder. When he opened the door to the entryway, the knocking was a pounding. That would not be Christine, that would be a man.

Henry hesitated. There were murders going on here. There were things going on. You never know what those people might do. You couldn’t count on them, because they didn’t rely on their reason. They didn’t rely on logic. They relied on fantasies, and all fantasies were murderous in the end.

Henry went into the entryway. Somebody was pounding and calling. Three pounds, then the call. Boom, boom, boom. The a muffled voice that sounded as if it were calling his name. What movie was that from? The original version of The Haunting, he thought. Henry had read the book, The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson, when he was much younger. He didn’t read that sort of thing anymore. Ghosts, for God’s sake. It wasn’t good to encourage that kind of thing anymore. It wasn’t good to say “for God’s sake.” The fundies always jumped on it when you did. Aha! You said “for God’s sake!” You must really believe in God, even if you’re hiding it from yourself.

Henry pulled the front door open. The light was just beginning to get strong on Main Street, but it wasn’t that strong. There was no angry mob storming his door with torches. The man on the doorstep—Gregor Demarkian. Henry recognized him from television. He looked past Demarkian and up the street.

Henry stepped back and waved Gregor Demarkian inside. “Sorry,” he said. “I’m in a bit of a mess. My secretary quit, and now I can’t find anything.”

“Your secretary quit?”

Demarkian was in the front hall. Henry closed the door behind him. He dwarfed the place. He made the ceiling look too low, and the hall not as wide as it should have been. Henry thought he was at least as tall as Nick Frapp, or close, but he was bulked out more. He looked like he might have played football.

“It’s this lawsuit,” Henry said, going back toward the outer office and waving Demarkian to follow him. “It’s got the whole town in a mess. And Christine was not exactly on my side, if you catch my drift. It’s impossible to find a secretary in this town who would be on my side in this. The kind of people who understand and respect science, and reason, well, if they’re in Snow Hill, they tend to move out. And stay out. Which is what I should have done.”