When the sound of their pa.s.sage had gone, Griffen let himself down from the ledge and moved to look at what was left of her. One breast had been bared and scored by fangs, but was still intact. It wasall that was intact.

He leaned against the side wall of the cave and fought to keep his stomach down.

Finally, the thought of what she had intended came to rest in his mind, and he tried to be phlegmatic about it. Then he turned and went back down the channel to find Cory. A man can't be too vengeful when his wife has been torn to shreds by killer pigs and the wife's paramour has just saved you from a fate worse than death. A man tends to be grateful in those circ.u.mstances. There might even be a tidy reward.

It would have to be the least Cory could do for a nice guy like Griff.

Eight.

Pride in the Profession There were many who called the lynching of Eustace Powder a blot on the previously-unbesmirched reputation of Princetown, but for Matthew Carty, it was the handing-down of a latter-day Ten Commandments.

The alleged crime for which the dusty Negro was swung high is of no consequence at this time; suffice to say he was innocent, if not in thought, at least in deed, indeed; but all things pa.s.s, and the momentary upheavals that result in the neck-stretching of one unimportant dark man are of no importance in the shadow of later, more electric events.

For it was the excitement, the crowd-respect directed at the man who knotted the rope and threw it over the elm's thick branch, that struck eight-year-old Matt Carty with such lasting force. The humid, expectant rustle of the summer day, the pavement warm beneath his bare, dirty feet, the women watching flame-eyed. It was all such a rich experience, he could not put it from him.

There was even an unexpected touch of homespun humor. The black, black man's last request, jocularly offered by one of the local rakeh.e.l.ls, was to have a pair of dice, to hold in his hand when they swung him aloft. "Those who live by the bones gonnadie by the bones!" replied the last-request-man, and fishing in his own jeans, he came up with a fine set of red plastic dice; as neat a set of see-through galloping dominoes as ever was. And giving them to Eustace Powder, the local happy-smith patted the Negro on the cheek. "Roll a natural, boogie." He grinned, and the black man clenched them in his fist tightly as they yanked him aloft.

The face of the gap-toothed Eustace Powder, his mouthings of horror and expectation. The gurgle and retching and final gasp as he swung clear of the ground. He seemed to thrash and twitch interminably. It was one of the two high points of Matt Carty's life, even if Powderdid drop one of them.

In the light of that one incident, his existence was systematically directed, till the day he died, many years later.

For Matt Cartyliked the idea of being a hangman.

There was a certain pride a man could take in such a profession. So he took pride, and he took the profession. It suited him, and he suited it. A wedding of the right job with the proper tool.

Matt Carty had always been a little man. Not a small man, for that is a thing of personality, and Matt's personality was just fine, thank you. He was outgoing and dryly witty, with perception to temper it; but this was too much offset by his lack of height - an almost comical lack. He was five feet, one inch tall.

He had often considered elevator shoes. Only the inherent hypocrisy of them prevented their purchase. In their place he subst.i.tuted an almost pathetic eagerness for love and friendship. Indiscriminately, Matt Carty made friends.

Unfortunately, they did not stick to him for long: "Jeez, it's real funny, meeting a guy from Princetown here in Chi. I mean, me being a guy from Henshaw, I mean that's only twenty-six miles, an' this is a h.e.l.luva big town. Wanta 'nother drink, Matt?"

"Oh, golly, no. So tell me - uh, what was it? Harold? - Harold, tell me, what are you doing here in Chicago?"

"I'm a buyer for a linoleum house. You know, I price rolls and cuttings. How about you?""I'm at the U. of C."

"No kidding?"

"Uh-huh. Studying plane geometry and advanced engineering design."

"What line are you in?"

"I'm a hangman."

"- uh?"

"That's right. I'm a professional executioner. I work free-lance for the states. Of course, I haven't had too many jobs to my credit, but, well,you know ... you've got to start somewhere. You see, I'm studying the mathematics of falling weights, and the force of vectors so when I - say, where are you going?"

"- uh - I just saw an old friend of mine, a business acquaint - I, uh, gotta go. Say, it was real swell meeting you; take it easy, huh."

End of friendship.

With love, it was considerably more difficult. Being a normal, red-blooded American lad, Matt Carty sought the companionship of attractive young women. But in that case, also, it was star-crossed: "Matty, pleeease!"

"Aw, c'mon, Jeannie."

"Now, Matthew Carty, if you don't take your hand out of there, I'm getting out of this car thisminute! "

"I thought you loved me ..."

"... well ... Ido , but ..."

"But what?"

A prolonged silence.

"Isn't the night cool, Jeannie?"

"Mmm."

"It was on nights like this that the hangmen of Henry the First's period prepared their scaffolds."

"What a perfectlysick thing to think about, Matt."

"Why, what's sick about it? I think it's a real fine thing to think about. I mean, after all, itis my line of work."

"You-ywhaaat? "

"I, uh ... heh-heh ..."

"You told me you were in lumber!""Heh-heh ..."

"What, exactly, do you do for a living, Mr. Carty?"

"I'm a, uh, well, I'm a h -"

End of love.

But the hazards of the trade were offset by other, more ephemeral, pleasures. There was the pleasure of the feel of good hemp stretched taut. There was the satisfyingrightness of a great weight swinging free, like a pendulum, at the end of a straight plumb. There was the heady wine of sound produced by the progression of an execution: Feet mounting scaffold.

Milling about.

Monotoned prayers.

Man puffing cigarette.

Adjustment sounds, most precise.

Trap release.

The door banging free.

The thwumpppp!

The twannnng!

The sound of silence.

From the first tentative stirrings within him, the subliminal cravings for recognition - recognition in the field he had chosen - Matt Carty had gone about the business of preparation properly. First high school, with emphasis on woodworking (in case of do-it-yourself emergencies), mathematics, abnormal psychology, dynamics of geometry and a fine grounding in biology - one must know the merchandise with which one works.

Then college, with several architectural courses, penology, criminology, group behavior cla.s.ses, ethics, advanced vector a.n.a.lysis and even biochemistry. He did not stay long at any one University, however, and as a consequence, he never came up with a degree of any sort. How could he, with the variegated courses he undertook, a smattering of one, a spray-exposure to another?

And oddly enough, there were no deterrents to his career. His parents at first expressed a white-faced horror and complete refusal of cooperation. But they were much too involved with their own problems - she with her religion composed of unequal parts devout hypochondria and incipient nymphomania, and he withhis G.o.d: the Mighty Green Buck - so they sent young Matthew to the schools he wished to attend.

Thus he observed the slaughtering of cattle, watching carefully as they were weighted and hung. He sat in at executions. His eyes were constantly on watch for stresses and effects brought about by pressure and dead-weight. He carried on harmless experiments.

He went to study at Columbia, and fell in with a disparate clique of Greenwich Village bohemians, one ofwhom was a bottle-auburn brunette named Carinthe who inducted him into the mysteries of s.e.x and liquor, narcotics and bad poetry, and who cast him aside, huskless, some months later, leaving him with a bruised id and a resolute determination to become the first hangman in history to bring neck-stretching out as a sincere art-form.

Soon enough, for he was - as noted - perceptive and diligent, he developed a certain efficiency and style in the matters of hangsmanship. So, figuratively speaking, he hung out his shingle.

He offered himself - after his first bonding - to the state of New Hampshire. His rate was reasonable, his manner quick and orderly, and the job was dispatched with aplomb and a certain grace. His reputation was very much like a summer virus: it spread to odd places and sank deep.

By the time he was an unwrinkled thirty, Matthew Carty was known as "that hanging man" and he had acquired a scent of fame that was responsible for articles inTHE SAt.u.r.dAY REVIEW, andTHE AMERICAN PENOLOGIST. He was known as "that hanging man."

There were high points, of course, as there must be in all careers of note: The celebrated swinging of "Lousy" Harry Gottesman, the helicopter-employing rustler, in Montana. His was a singular case: Mr. Gottesman weighed three hundred and sixteen pounds. It brought Matthew Carty to the notice of law enforcement agencies in each of the (then, nine; now seven) states and two territories where hanging was the accepted form of capital punishment. And, until they became states, switching to life imprisonment, Hawaii and Alaska as well. For Gottesman's demise was achieved with a facility and care that could only be arranged by a genius in his field.

In his way, Matthew Carty had become the Pica.s.so of the scaffold.

There was an all-expense-paid trip to Hawaii, in the sixth year of his fame, sponsored by the local government, to perform what the officials called an "Alohaceremony" on Miss Melba Rooney, a four-timer poisoner of husbands, not all of them her own.

There was the notoriety gained from the Restout Case, and its accompanying gruelling activity on the part of the Utah state police to locate Algernon Restout's victim, a certain Miss Mamie Helf, known locally as an exotic dancer. Mr. Restout had separated the well-known belly dancer from her equipment - with a meat cleaver.

Public sentiment was high on that occasion; the bleachers were packed, and the popcorn sales were a local record high; Matthew Carty fulfilled his obligation to an attentive audience.

In each case, and to each hanging, Carty brought a certain indefinable gentleness andsavoir-faire that were identifiable to the perceptive as an unflagging pride in his profession.

He was the best, and there was no getting around it.

Then, when he had begun soaking his plates in warm salt water, when he had acquired a st.u.r.dy set of grouse-tracks around his eyes and nose, when he had been warned by his doctor to move slowly in protection of an aging heart, when he was, in short, in the thickening of his lifetime, he was called upon to create history.

It was several months after he had completed the execution of a certain gun-runner named Moxlossis, who had butchered his partner with an icepick over a center cut offilet mignon on the cruise hack from Cuba, when the governor of the state of Delaware contacted him.

By official conveyance, Matthew Carty was brought to the State House, and in secret session with theGovernor - that year a rather paunchy man with a predilection for cigarillos and fetid breath - he was informed he was to preside at the hanging of Dr. Bruno Kolles.

Matthew Carry's aging heart leaped into his wrinkled throat. The culmination of a glorious career! The piece de resistance!

Matthew swallowed heavily, and swung his short legs in the air with unrestrained emotion. It was a high-legged chair, and though he felt awkward, this was news enough to sublimate his feelings of awkwardness.

The Kolles case was acause celebre . The tabloids had been publishing steadily on the matter, publicizing his arrest and conviction for over seven months: Anna Pasteur had been a cancer victim. Her days had been numbered, and her body wasting away. It had been a body loved with singular ardor by Dr. Kolles, and as a result of the strain and horror visited upon the good Doctor at sight of his paramour wasting away, a mercy killing had been performed, her hand locked in his throughout the activity with hypodermic and sleep-inducing drug.

It had been quick and with sweet terror. But he had been discovered in the act by a jealous nurse, a remarkably horsey woman he had several times rebuffed, and she had turned him in. The case had been followed with much accompanying conjecture and opinion from all sides.

It was, in fact, that the country was divided in its feelings. Half the people believed he should be turned loose - for his had been an act of compa.s.sion, easily understood and condoned - and half believed he should be hanged with brutal speed.

Thus it was that the Governor of the state of Delaware (chewing on a fetid cigarillo) told Matthew Carty, "We cannot chance a slip-up in this matter. Public sentiment is too strong." There was a detectable note in the Governor's voice, vaguely reminiscent of subdued hysteria. "You can do a speedy job, without trouble, can't you?"

Matthew a.s.sured him he could. He was most convincing. The tariff on this execution was slightly higher than usual, for the prestige was greater.

Prestige, yes, but more! This was the high point of a career marked by high points.

On the morning of the execution, Matthew felt strange quivers in his stomach. He told himself it was the nervousness of hisgreatest job, his most exacting bit of artistry. It was da Vinci completingLa Gioconda; it was Wilbur and Orville on that chilly morning near Kitty Hawk; it was Melville, cribbing out painfully the last magnificent lines of "Moby d.i.c.k."

He felt like Icarus soaring toward the sun.

The public notice - which would not be removed until after the inquest - had been posted some twenty hours before. The demonstrators had been staunchly turned back from the prison walls. The sheriff, jailer, chaplain and surgeon of the prison all were present, as well as several dry-faced relatives, resigned to the fate of Dr. Kolles.

Matthew Carty made a point of never meeting the man (or woman) he was to execute, but today was something special, something remarkable, so he went to the cell in the late afternoon, rubbing his chin warily.

He wanted to meet the man who was soon to be the most intimately involved with his art. It seemed fitting, though oddly disquieting, somehow.Kolles was a short, fat man. Not quite as short as Matthew, but still under five-and-a-half feet. He had a fine hairline mustache that seemed almost hesitant about its own existence, and he took the impending stretching of his neck with restrained impotence.

"Are you the man who is going to do this thing?"

Matthew nodded. "I thought I'd come in and say I'll make it as quick as I can."

Kolles bowed his head. A red flush came up from inside his shirt and clouded his face. "What kind of a manare you?" he asked with a quiet fury. It was the first sign of emotional strain he had evinced since the beginning of his trial. "I'm a man who tried to save lives ... but ...you! Youtake them, without apparent compunction."

Carty stared at him silently for a moment. Then he leaned down and stuck his uncomplicated face into the Doctor's. "I'm a craftsman," he explained. "My idol has always been Henry I of England. Do you know why? Because he furthered the cause of hanging. He was a great man, and his life has given me inspiration. I'm an artist, Doctor. My work is important. I take a great deal of pride in it, because I'm the best in my field.

"Can you understand that?"

None of it made much sense, and of course the good doctor didnot understand.

Dr. Kolles turned his face to the wall.

Matthew Carty left the cell, and went out to the courtyard where the white pine scaffold rose in cleanlimbed serenity. This was the first time he had been talked to like that since the days of his rude beginnings, when the girls had slapped him and turned gray at mention of his beloved trade. The days before fame had made him tolerable, if not socially acceptable. He had encysted himself, and this stripping-off of his sh.e.l.l left him raw and unprotected. He shuddered to himself.

The fools, he thought, they could never understand me.

He checked the sash weights and the oiled trap. He checked the arm and the lever and the floorboards for squeaks - which made an unpleasant effect of jollity when he was struggling so earnestly for somberness and seriousness. Yes, everything was in readiness.

Kolles would drop eight feet before the breaking strain. And served him right Yet that nervousness, compounded with the annoyance generated by the Doctor, and the pressure of the event itself, further unsettled Matthew Carty. He began to perspire on the job for the first time in his life.

He found himself biting his perfect little nails.