Enigmatic Pilot_ A Tall Tale Too True - Kris Saknussemm [112]
Silhouettes fluttered over plank walls, and in the distance a hound howled, which made Lloyd think again of poor Tip, buried back in Zanesville along with their old life. Lodema.
He stepped between the ruts and puddles, moving in the direction of the music, remembering the evil that had befallen him in that laneway in St. Louis at the hands of the man with the harelip. Hattie had cured him of the shame, but the anger remained. And the wariness.
Squishing through the mud, which his mother would no doubt be angry about, he reached the shelter of a buckboard leaning down on its hitch across the street. Then in between the buildings. Somewhere he could hear horses jostling and whinnying in a stable.
The music, however, proved to be elusive. Where he had thought to find people gathered around a fire with their instruments, a couple of wagons and oil lanterns propped on casks, there was but an empty lot and the skeletal frame of a building going up. The camp where the music was coming from, and now beginning to die out, lay farther on, behind a row of makeshift sheds and a cluster of willow trees. The shadows he had seen earlier must have been made by other people and had melted away. Yet there were still some lights. The nearest and brightest came from a crude brick storehouse on the other side of a drenched pea patch. Someone had taken a spade and dug several runoff trenches to direct the water into the lumpy garden, and he had to mind his step. The light in the storehouse grew dimmer as he approached, as if the building were beginning to doze.
Now that the notion of investigating the source of the music had passed from his mind, Lloyd was without a plan of action and had half a mind to return to the Clutters’ and try to go to sleep, but there did not seem any harm in at least having a peek in the storehouse to see what was going on. Picking his way through the pea patch he became more intrigued, as from its exterior the storehouse appeared to be abandoned, and he had not seen buildings that were not being used in the town. Something was going on inside, though.
He crept up close to the yawning, empty window frame, which, with the softness of the mud underfoot, was infuriatingly just a little too high for him to see into. There was no choice but to stand on tiptoe and hold on to the ledge. By hoisting himself up just a few inches, he would be able to peer inside. Of course, his fingers might be visible from within, but there was no other way, short of trying to sneak in the heavy barn-width door, which might well have been barred anyway.
As quietly as he could, he reached up and grabbed hold of the rough-troweled masonry and dragged himself into the square of light cast from inside the storehouse. In the blend of moonlight and diffused gleam from within, he could see that the chinks in the slapdash brickwork had been patched with mortar and mud, and were flecked with old desiccated wasp nests and cobwebs. He tried to brace his boots against the chinks without making a scraping sound. What he saw at first surprised him as much as the sight that had greeted his eyes when the Vardogers’ music box had opened.
It was the Quists, all gathered together in a circle around a group of tallow candles arranged in a Star of David pattern atop a cross, which from his point of view was upside down. There were perhaps twenty or thirty adults, with a couple